Eccentricity, impartiality and sentimental travel in George Carey’s The Balnea (1799–1801)

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Guidebooks
• travelogues
• tourism
• eccentricity
• impartiality
• sentimentalism

Today, the best-known account of the spas and seaside resorts of early nineteenth-century England is A.B. Granville’s three-volume The Spas of England, and Principal Sea-Bathing Places (1841). Detailing the mineral contents and associated amenities of countless spring waters, along with the coastal destinations and the new opportunities afforded by railway travel, Granville’s touristic triple-decker recorded its author’s quest to capture the inchoate; to fix, in print, the shifting landscape of domestic leisure. In producing the work, Granville was impelled by the twin aims of accuracy and exhaustiveness. In particular, he pitched his work against the deficiencies of printed guidebooks to individual resorts, such as the “fulsome, hyperbolical, and improbable eulogiums upon every thing concerning it” to be found in available accounts of Leamington (1841, 2:252). Against such examples of localised promotion, Granville sought to fashion a disinterested overview that might do for the watering-places of England what his Spas of Germany (published in 1837) had done for those of Germany. As Spas of England also attests, Granville’s nationwide survey constituted a feat of travel as well as writing, the fieldwork for which saw him tirelessly traversing the country, pursuing numerous tip-offs about recently sprung and barely known springs well beyond the established resorts such as Harrogate, Bath and Brighton.

Although The Spas of England is the most enduring example, Granville was not the first to attempt such an overview of the nation’s water-based resorts. That distinction falls to George Saville Carey (1743–1807) and The Balnea: Or, An Impartial Description of all the Popular Watering Places in England, which was published in three editions between 1799 and 1801. As its dating suggests, such survey-style guidebooks started appearing in the period between the French Revolution and the Battle of Waterloo when, for the most part, domestic travel filled in for travel abroad. Like various other “early guidebooks” published in the era before Murray and Baedeker, Carey and Granville’s works were, in James Buzard’s words, “the rather hybrid, discursive productions of an individual” (1993, 67). For this reason, these texts are not susceptible of straightforward categorisation. At base, both The Balnea and The Spas of England combine two key elements which, as Alasdair Pettinger observes, would later become distinct: the travelogue, representing “a journey that has already taken place”, and the guidebook, with its “fantasy that the reader is invited to act out” (2020, 142). It is important to note though that the authorial journeys represented in these works do not entirely correlate to the travelling they propose. Whereas the reader’s envisioned movement is to a single destination or small group of proximal resorts, perhaps interspersed with occasional day-trips, that undertaken by the author, as a form of research and effective trial-run, involves an agglomeration or maximalised version of these journeys. To this extent, the “travelogue” here partly exists in tension with the “guidebook”. Although Carey and Granville both recount their own travels around the country, neither projects the kind of national “tour” that a reader might think of imitating in its entirety (a tour of end-points, as it would be).¹

While The Spas of England and The Balnea can both be situated as examples of the early survey-guidebook, there are also significant differences between them. Contrary to the promise of its title, Carey’s offering is less comprehensive, and less regular in design, than Granville’s. In its very vagaries, I want to argue here, The Balnea offers particular insights into the formation of the survey-guidebook and its relationship to both travel and travel-writing. Following an overview of its aims and editions, the article examines the clash in the work between its two main textual forms: the travel guidebook (envisioned as systematic, comprehensive and impartial) and the first-person travelogue (encompassing Carey’s personal interests, evaluative biases and penchant for sentimental representation). A minor author of miscellaneous texts, Carey lacked the secure reputation and professional expertise of an established author-doctor like Augustus Bozzi Granville MD, FRS. His previous writings had included a variety of songs, a masque on Shakespeare’s Jubilee (1769), a Lecture on Mimicry (1776) – a performance of which he toured around the country – and A Rural Ramble; To which is Annexed a Poetical Tagg, or Brighthelmstone Guide (1777). Lacking clear credentials for surveying the nation’s leisure culture (or, like Granville, assessing its mineral waters), Carey grounded his claim to authority instead in an Enlightenment conception of impartiality. Within the pages of The Balnea, though, impartiality turns out to be a complex and elusive ideal, subject to a range of possible meanings. At the same time, the work’s descriptive accounts of watering-places co-exist awkwardly with a number of separate interests and emphases. Among other things, The Balnea presents Carey’s (discredited) claim that his late father, Henry Carey, was the author of the national anthem, “God Save the King” – a claim that underpinned his (unsuccessful) application for a royal pension, as he relates in the text itself. Such diversions from his central subject are partly justified in the text via a spatial metaphor of narrative excursion. As Carey observes following a digression towards the end of the second edition: “But I have been wandering too long out of the road … ” (1799b, 240). At such moments, The Balnea is discursively “eccentric”, or ex-centric, “departing, or deviating from a center”, as William Rider defined the term in his New Universal English Dictionary (1759, non. pag.). Despite being based on his own travels around the country, moreover, Carey’s narrative purposely muddies the waters regarding the dating and chronology of a number of the episodes it relates. This is not least the case with a series of “sentimental” personal encounters, which are presented as the basis for some of Carey’s songs and which, I shall suggest, undermine the work’s status as a systematic guidebook while raising questions about the integrity and good faith of the narrative itself.

“This Balnearean system”: Carey’s design and scope

The Balnea was Carey’s response to what he characterised as the increasing “rage” for watering-place tourism at the turn of the nineteenth century. “This Balnearean system”, an opening “Apology” declares, would offer a necessary counterbalance to the guidebooks to individual resorts already available. As he contests, in words that anticipate Granville: “There are partial accounts given of every place that I have spoken of, but they have been written by some inhabitant on the spot, or some hireling … ” (1799a, 5). Existing guidebooks, that is to say, were biased, either by personal prejudice or by the financial self-interest of their authors. By extension, a general survey of the watering-places of England was less liable to suspicion on the grounds of partiality to any particular location. This critique would not actually prevent Carey from quoting from local guidebooks and histories, as he does in his account of Rochester’s past or, in the third edition, from “the Chichester Guide” (1801, 74). More broadly, though, what The Balnea purported to offer the traveller was a kind of rough sketch, or mental map, of the available resorts. As Carey declares in his prefatory remarks: “What I have ventured to give the Public is little more than a kind of Chart, in which the Reader, looking over it by his fire-side in the winter, may bethink himself what place would be the most convenient for him to visit in the summer” (1799a, vi). Unlike guidebooks to individual resorts, The Balnea would enable comparisons to be made, to the precise touristic end of selecting the best fit for a summer vacation. This positioning constituted a variation on a distinction made in works such as Thomas Martyn’s A Tour through Italy, between idling texts that were designed to be “read by the fire side at home” and the work at hand, which would prove a “useful companion” while actually travelling (1791, [iii], vii). In his particular twist on the formula, Carey presented The Balnea as a new form of brochure: as an aid to prospective travellers, rather than a substitute for travel or a practical handbook for actual travellers.

For all its titular claims to comprehensiveness and objectivity, The Balnea would not be as systematic as this “Balnearean system” suggests. Carey himself was not necessarily well-suited to the task of describing the nation’s watering-places. He was, for instance, neither a medical practitioner nor especially enquiring about the chemical properties of mineral waters. His lack of such knowledge is exposed early on in The Balnea during an account of Tunbridge Wells. As Carey here declares: “Of what quality the mineral springs of this place may be is best known to the diplomatist, who, for his own sake, may have analysed them, or the credulous invalid, who may have been complaisant enough to drink them; but, we are told, as every quack says of his nostrum, they are good for all diseases” (1799a, 44–5). This was a by-now hackneyed jest about mineral waters which had previously appeared, among other places, in Christopher Anstey’s verse-satire, The New Bath Guide ([1766] 2010). At other moments, Carey also appears displeased with the task he has set himself. The very process of touring the resorts elicits complaints about expense and practical inconveniences that recall the similar refrains of Tobias Smollett’s Travels Through France and Italy (published in 1766). Before setting out, he contemplates the “mortifications”, “impositions” and “impediments” facing the domestic traveller, who will find themselves “a victim to the hostler, the coachman, the waiter, the chamber-maid, and the inn-keeper” (1799a, 2). To travel domestically, Carey suggests, is akin to being “a convict … on his voyage to Botany-bay”, subject to “a degree of terror, and sometimes cruelty” (3). Once embarked, he bemoans the costs incurred by travel: “Every article of life”, he laments, is “uncommonly dear” at Tunbridge Wells (53); in Brighton, both fruit and lodgings are “very scarce and very dear” (66); while, “in the watering season” at Southampton, “every article of life” is likewise “extremely dear” (78). This disgruntled register would be extended in the enlarged second edition of The Balnea, published later the same year. To his account of Margate and its environs, Carey now added further Smollettian complaints about “abuse and impertinence from the coachmen and waiters”, along with other “mortifications” of travelling, and about the dangers to health of sea-bathing (1799b, 40–4). Turning from sea-waters to spas, an inserted paragraph on Harrogate concurs with the opinion that its sulphurous waters “taste like rotten eggs and gunpowder” (207–8). In a peculiar addition that involves a dual complaint about slave trafficking and conditions on the hoys, moreover, Carey compares the treatment of passengers to Margate to that suffered by “the poor unfortunate negroes” (38). None of this, suffice to say, constituted the kind of advertisement for domestic tourism that the work had initially purported to offer.

Where Smollett had been repeatedly outraged by his treatment on the Continent, Carey thus found equal cause for ire in England. Perhaps for this reason, The Balnea is somewhat circumscribed in its scope. What its title-page terms “all” the watering-places amounts, in the first edition, to a total of twenty. Even allowing for an equivocation about describing only “popular” watering-places, this was significantly less ambitious than many later guidebooks, including Granville’s.² In other ways, also, The Balnea represented an incomplete and often digressive attempt at such a panoramic survey. The narrative’s formal looseness is acknowledged on its title-page, which indicates that its “impartial description” would be “Interspersed with original Sketches and incidental Anecdotes” and include “Observations on several ancient and respectable Towns and Cities leading to” the watering-places themselves. As this baked-in ex-centricity suggests, Carey was prone, both geographically and discursively, to diversions from the principal design of his survey-guidebook. Indicatively, most of the new matter included in the second edition, which added material on Winchester, York and Edinburgh, did not actually concern watering-places or even observations made en route to them. Such insistent digressiveness would be highlighted in a number of contemporary reviews of the work. The most positive notice appeared in the Monthly Mirror, which commended the first edition as “a most pleasant and lively melange, the result of much whim and observation” (1799, 35). Subsequent reviewers offered more downbeat assessments. Addressing the author’s claims concerning his father’s authorship of “God Save the King”, the Monthly Review disparaged the work’s “bad puns and extraneous matter” (1799, 357). A critic for the Analytical Review also registered “a degree of pertness and flippancy about this book which is very disgusting” (1799, 643). Carey, he continued, was over-familiar with readers and “obtrudes” upon them his dispute with Charles Dibdin (ca. 1745–1814), an unnamed yet recurrent focus of the work’s anecdotal deviations who was, as the Critical Review sniped, Carey’s “more successful rival” as a composer of popular song (1799, 360).

The reviewers also highlighted the limited number of resorts covered in Carey’s Balnearean brochure. Perhaps in partial response, the third edition of The Balnea, published in 1801, offered slightly expanded coverage. Again advertised as “considerably enlarged”, this new edition of Carey’s “little rambling publication” (1801, 73) covered three new resorts (Worthing, Arundel and Harwich), expanded some previous entries, and introduced further poetic and anecdotal matter.³ Significantly, some of the revisions to the text were necessitated by developments in resort culture itself. Worthing, for instance, was now on the rise, while “Bognar” [Bognor] had been “considerably improved since the first edition of the BALNEA was published”, two years earlier (77–8). Carey was here confronting the in-built obsolescence of the travel guide, the constant requirement for updated editions.⁴ In registering such changes to the cultural landscape of leisure, he was keen to distinguish material improvements from mere seasonal fluctuations and fashionable fads. He is sarcastic, for instance, about the role of royal influence in the increased popularity enjoyed by Worthing after Princess Amelia bathed there, in 1798, to ease an injured knee (68–9). Incipiently aware of his text’s limited shelf-life, Carey thematised the subject of change itself in the revised entry on Tunbridge via a quotation from Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (published in 1768). Noting the Assembly Room, bowling green, taverns and other amenities that once adorned Mount Ephraim, Carey invokes the opening of the chapter titled “THE SWORD. RENNES”: “‘when states and empires have their periods of declension, I scruple not to tell the causes which have brought’ a common mountain to decay … ” (43).⁵ Although the quotation is not directly attributed, its inclusion renders more apparent The Balnea’s broader indebtedness to Sterne’s sentimental travelogue, as well as to Smollett’s splenetic one.⁶ As in other contemporary narratives, this allusion to Sterne provokes the use of impressionistic dashes, as Carey’s prose mimics Sterne’s trademark style. At the very end of this final edition of the work, the tonal and generic juxtapositions of The Balnea, with its mixture of travel-writing, sentimentalism and song, are further exemplified by advertisements for other books for purchase from William West and Thomas Hughes, Carey’s publishers. Included here are Thomas Pennant’s travelogues from London to Dover, Dover to the Isle of Wight, and Downing to Alston Moor (all 1801); Oliver Goldsmith’s The Vicar of Wakefield (published in 1766); Sterne’s Sentimental Journey; and The Myrtle and the Vine (1800): a work that included Carey’s own “Essay on Singing and Song Writing” along with nine of his songs, a number of which are also reprinted in The Balnea itself.

“Beauties and defects”: impartiality and its discontents

The Balnea, then, was both digressive and something of a textual hodge-podge, and Carey himself deficient as a guide to the nation’s leisure resorts. In its very aberrations, though, the work usefully highlights some of the broader challenges involved in surveying the contemporary culture of watering-places. Notably, for all its variety, digressiveness and complaints about the practical difficulties presented by domestic tourism, Carey’s guidebook cleaved to its claim to impartiality. The resort-specific guidebooks Carey had in his sights while making this claim had proliferated by the end of the eighteenth century. By this point, certain variations had emerged within the form: while guidebooks typically prioritised information for the visiting tourist, individual works dwelt on local history, balneological considerations, available excursions and personal experiences to varying degrees. Yet few could entirely escape Carey’s charge of local or commercial bias. As Peter Borsay and Phyllis Hembry contend, printed guidebooks were “perhaps the watering-place’s most powerful image-making machine”, an essential source of “publicity” for any resort wishing to fix itself on the touristic map (Borsay 2000, 802; Hembry 1990, 160). More broadly, as Rosemary Sweet notes, guidebooks published from the later seventeenth century onwards display a marked degree of “hyperbole”, designed to “draw travellers to the town” (1997, 102). As such, Carey was easily able to argue that such works were inherently partial, their lack of objectivity necessarily implied by their focus on, and promotion of, individual locales only.

Against these seemingly compromised travel books, Carey proffered instead a more equitable viewpoint, the leisure-culture equivalent of an “equal, wide survey”.⁷ Like the aim of producing a “system” of water-based leisure, this foregrounding of its impartiality aligned The Balnea with a key tenet of Enlightenment rationalism and knowledge. Claims to impartiality were expressed in the period by historians and philosophers alike, albeit not always in these terms, and rarely straightforwardly. A simple English Short Title Catalogue search for “impartial” as a title word produces over 1900 hits for the period 1700–1800, with just over 300 falling in the decade 1790–1800.⁸ Such frequency corresponds to the status of impartiality as a standard for enlightened discourse – even if the need to pronounce one’s impartiality might itself raise questions about one’s exercise of it. The term’s range of overlapping meanings is highlighted in Johnson’s Dictionary, which defines “impartial” as “Equitable; free from regard to party; indifferent; disinterested; equal in distribution of justice; just”, and “impartially” as to act “Equitably; with indifferent and unbiassed judgment; without regard to party or interest; justly; honestly” (1755, 1:non. pag.). Particular uses of the term evidence both its appeal and its elusiveness. In a letter of 1758, for instance, Tobias Smollett claimed, in somewhat self-aggrandising fashion, to be entirely even-handed in his historical writing: “I have flattered no Individual; I have cultivated no Party … I pique myself upon being the only Historian of this Country who has had Honesty, Temper and Courage enough to be wholly impartial and disinterested”.⁹ The irony of this self-flattering self-defence is instructive: it could be difficult to establish a fixed vantage point of impartiality, securely cossetted from personal preferences, prejudices, passions or interests. Probably the best-known use of the term in this period is the “impartial spectator” in Adam Smith’s The Theory of Moral Sentiments (published in 1759), a figure whom Alexander Broadie terms a “hero” of the Enlightenment (2001, 101) but whose precise identity and functioning remain matters of scholarly disagreement.¹⁰ Smith’s imaginary entity encapsulates the difficulty of conceptualising an objective viewpoint distinct from one’s own views, feelings and biases: for how could this “inhabitant of the breast, the man within” (1976, 137) also possess a detached perspective entirely outside of it?¹¹

Despite these conceptual difficulties, the claim to impartiality promised a form of cultural cachet that Carey evidently wished to tap into. An inauspicious start is made by Carey’s epigraph, “I cannot flatter, and I will not lie”: a misquotation from Alexander Pope’s Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot. The original line, “Who can’t be silent, and who will not lye”, suggests that impartiality involves plain-speaking, albeit in a poem that is couched in the rhetoric of the satiric apologia and which contains ten instances of the word “lie” or “lies” (1735, 3 [line 34]). But what, precisely, did impartiality entail here? Was an inability to flatter, or simple plain-speaking, sufficient to ensure impartiality? What role might fairness, or justice, play within such a claim? Did being impartial involve treating each watering-place on its own merits? Or did it require making evaluative distinctions on the basis of some broader set of standards, so as to produce a kind of league table of contemporary leisure? In the terms outlined by Johnson, Carey could certainly be said to be “indifferent” and without particular “interest” with regard to individual watering-places: he was not seeking to promote any specific resort. Yet any particular criticisms he did make could easily appear either unequal or unjust: the manifestation of personal views and tastes, rather than an indifferent appraisal of each resort on its own terms. Given that contesting views were inevitable, how was the “unbiassed judgment” of the author of the leisure survey to be firmly established?

One approach was to tout a sense of inevitable balance. As Carey himself puts it: “Every one of the places in question have their beauties and defects” (1799a, vi). Outlining both the merits and the deficiencies of each resort would reflect the fact, as Sterne had put it in A Sentimental Journey, that every place has its “POUR” and its “CONTRE”, so that “there is a balance … of good and bad every where” (2002, 83). Notwithstanding his occasional reversion to Smollettian spleen, Carey seems to have had Sterne in mind at various points over the three editions of The Balnea. In effect, his opening assertion of equitable treatment of the resorts, so as to cover the “beauties and defects” of each, constituted an adaptation, to domestic tourism, of the cosmopolitan principle on which Sterne (via his fictional persona, Yorick) had sought to conduct Continental travel.¹² Yet a difficulty remained, for how could the aim of offering a balanced picture be reconciled with the desideratum of honesty – of offering one’s actual assessments of specific watering-places?

As quickly becomes apparent, the author of The Balnea was not the best exponent of detached even-handedness: in practice, Carey clearly does distinguish between his resorts of preference and places he doesn’t favour. It is Bath that ranks highest in the Balnearean scale of leisure. Rather than offering a balance sheet of “beauties” and “defects”, Carey points instead to a surfeit of splendours, as he struggles to cover each of Bath’s “numerous beauties and elegancies” (1799a, 117). Other resorts fare less well within his “impartial” survey. Although its Assembly room is “capacious, elegant, and well situated”, for instance, Brighton is positioned, comparatively, as less diverse than Margate, less tranquil than Tunbridge, albeit “visited by more nobility” than either owing to Prince George making it his summer residence (68, 59). Carey is dismissive of the “small bathing place” of Little Hampton, twenty-five miles west of Brighton, which “seems to be an unpleasant kind of place, fit only to inspire melancholy in a contemplative mind” (72–3). Besides joking about its being “little” (88), he has little positive to say about Lymington; while the “royal watering place” of Weymouth, similarly, has “nothing to recommend it, but its conveniency in respect to bathing” (90). Nor are the inhabitants of these locales excluded from his critique, which is marked throughout by status claims and prejudices. Early in the work, the entire “lower order of the natives” of Margate is described as “cunning, avaricious, disrespectful, and sometimes malevolent” (13), while the journey by hoy from London is liable to expose the traveller to “indecent scenes”, “indecent conversation” and “indelicate smells” (35).¹³ Carey is also insulting about the residents of Brighton, whose traders “make a tolerable market of the London gulls” (66). Extrapolating from such examples, the work’s complaints about the high prices of everyday purchases at watering-places gradually develop into a larger concern about the role of profiteering in the development of resort tourism. The entry on Yarmouth in Norfolk, for instance, pulls few punches in calling out resorts that appear to have been created to fleece unwary metropolitans: “This town, from its traffic and maritime intercourse, like Southampton and Scarborough, is more independent of the company that go there than Brighton, Margate, or Ramsgate; not a new-fangled place, built by greedy and insatiable swallows for a season, who live on the giddy summer-flies from London and its vicinity” (216). Here and elsewhere, Carey’s comparative analysis seems geared not so much to adjudicating “beauties” and “defects” as to identifying a form of corrosive commercial speculation in operation at what he terms the “mercenary places” on the London tourist circuit (217). Developing his theme of the fleecing of gulls, meanwhile, he introduces a poem on Brighton, “the reigning seat of fashion”, which registers the paradox that the metropolitan elite here praise what they would disdain back in London (71).¹⁴ By contrast to this sphere of fashionable “pleasure”, further verses are interpolated in praise of natural “tranquillity” (57–8). The nub of the distinction is expressed in relation to Harrogate. If there is “little etiquette” in this northern spa town, this is at least partly because the Company there are not “pestered with the officious and interesed [sic] cringings of an obsequious Master of the Ceremonies” (192).¹⁵ As in other late eighteenth-century works, the absence of polite “etiquette” and of a formal MC (in both senses of “formal”) is here presented as advantageous to a more natural exercise of spa sociability.¹⁶

Notwithstanding this praise of a less regimented regime, the overall impression conveyed by The Balnea is of an occasionally snide account of the development, and commercial progression, of the watering-places of England. In effect, Carey found himself caught between the ideal of impartiality, the guiding principle of his survey-guidebook, and his actual experiences and opinions, the stuff of the first-person travelogue. As a result, his “impartial description” might seem to affirm not the practical efficacy of the ideal but, rather, Iris Young’s contention that impartiality is an “idealist fiction”, neither plausible nor possible (1990, 104). As Young elaborates: “The stances of detachment and dispassion that supposedly produce impartiality are attained only by abstracting from the particularities of situation, feeling, affiliation, and point of view” (97).¹⁷ The second edition of The Balnea would see some attempt being made to reassert the objectivity of its descriptions, even as Carey also used the opportunity to enlarge upon his personal interests and agendas. Diverging once more from the topic of water-based resorts, the longest section of new material focuses on York and Edinburgh. A different kind of partiality appears to be at stake once Carey reaches Scotland, where a “bigoted” native recommends visiting Holyrood Palace, which Carey finds in a state of neglect and disrepair (1799b, 224). Carey later informs the Scotsman that he has seen “much better-looking goals [jails] in my own country” (226), which naturally causes offence. His disagreement with this “petulant Caledonian” (226) engenders further hits at the national prejudice of Scots and at “national bigotry” (229) more broadly. Complaining that the denizens of Edinburgh are continually extolling their country while denigrating England, Carey here enjoins the people of Scotland to “expand their minds, and become citizens of the world” (240). These barbed references to Scottish national prejudice can be read as a sly attempt to displace the failing of partiality onto others. By implication, Carey himself is a generous-minded cosmopolitan, who eschews such narrow-minded parochialism. Expanding the scope of his earlier statement about English watering-places, Carey now observes that “all nations have their beauties and their blemishes” (my emphasis) and repeats the Popean misquotation that stands as the work’s motto: “‘I cannot flatter, and I will not lie’” (240).

Despite his initial positioning of his text and these subsequent manoeuvres, reviewers and readers of the work were unconvinced by Carey’s stated commitment to even-handed assessment. Criticising, like others, the work’s “extraneous matter”, the New London Review commented archly on Carey’s real “partiality” for “egotism” (1799, 98). To the Critical Review, Carey had “mistaken severity for impartiality” (1799, 360). In this critic’s view, Carey’s accounts of the resorts were actually more likely to discourage than to attract would-be visitors. The very claim to impartiality also generated some – perhaps affected – bemusement in the Anti-Jacobin Review. Claiming that Carey’s “mode may be termed the humorous and the satyrical”, this critic questioned “what possible room there could be for the display of impartiality in the description of a town” (1799, 305) – as though an urban environment could only ever be neutral, or a partiality for particular places itself represented a kind of personal eccentricity. To Richard Scrafton Sharpe, Carey’s “hasty penned work”, with its “very ungenerous description of the inhabitants of Margate”, had failed to give a just account of one particular resort, or at least of its residents (1799, 20–1). As these various responses affirm, the general view, simply stated in the Monthly Visitor’s review of the second edition, was that “we cannot compliment the author on the impartiality of his descriptions” (1800, 215).

Sentimental strains: affectivity into song

In its actual accounts of English resort towns, then, The Balnea struggled to maintain the core distinction on which it was premised: between the biased accounts of local guidebooks and its own “impartial” survey. Carey’s establishment of a detached vantage point is also compromised by other “particularities” of “situation”, “feeling” and “point of view” that, as Young suggests, inevitably pull against the ostensible stance of “detachment and dispassion”. Most significantly, The Balnea incorporates a series of set-piece vignettes which see the travelling Carey happening upon a succession of poor, dispossessed, and heartbroken individuals. This sentimental register of emotive, one-off interactions is threaded through the work’s first edition. The first such encounter is with an indigent sailor whom Carey meets while in a contemplative mood near Netley Abbey. Observing the sailor’s evident “distress”, and fearing he might be suicidal, Carey enquiries about his situation. On hearing his history, Carey gives the sailor half a crown to alleviate his financial difficulties, and is repaid with tearful gratitude (1799a, 80–4). A second episode sees Carey serendipitously entering into conversation with a furloughed soldier, who has been covered in dirty water by Carey’s horse. In this instance, the subject of the narrator’s pity has “rashly enlisted” (155) following a marital disagreement. During a diversion to the Lakes, near the waterfall at Ambleside, Carey next encounters a “beautiful young damsel” in “deep distress” over her apparent abandonment by “her bethrothed Allen” (188). A final sentimental vignette in the first edition sees Carey and a friend encountering a “handsome” but “inconsolable” woman near a cave at Tynemouth; her own lover has recently drowned during a boating trip in the vicinity. In Carey’s assessment, this woman’s “situation was pitiable, her sorrow excessive”, and she is unwilling to leave the “melancholy spot” in which they find her. Turning the sentimental screw, he records having the “mortification” to learn that this unfortunate woman died of a “broken heart” the following day (211–2). This roster of sentimental subjects is expanded in the second edition, albeit with less tragic emphasis. On his return from Windsor, having failed to secure a royal pension on the basis of his father’s supposed penning of the national anthem, Carey now encounters “a poor girl almost bare footed, singing cheerfully” while selling water-cresses. The register here turns Sternean: “This is a harder lot than mine, said I; and, buying some of her cresses, put them in my handkerchief … ” (1799b, 125–6). Finally, towards the end of the entry on Buxton, a further addition sees Carey happening upon a “lonely shepherd” who is anxious about the dog-tax and its implications for his canine companion, the “faithful Fido” (195–6) – concerns the narrator is happily able to assuage.

As these episodes attest, during his national tour of England’s leisure resorts the author-traveller of The Balnea encounters, and consumes, the pitiable hardships of multiple individuals. In various ways, this strain in The Balnea accords with other sentimental travelogues of the period, many of which took their cue from A Sentimental Journey, as Linda Van Netten Blimke has recently emphasised.¹⁸ Whereas Carey’s assertion of his principle of impartiality drew on Sterne’s fictionalised articulation of his own cosmopolitan philosophy, the sentimental encounters threaded through The Balnea are more redolent of the Journey’s privileging of affective interactions over empirical modes of touristic sight-seeing. As Sterne has Yorick proudly declare: “I have not seen the Palais royal—nor the Luxembourg—nor the Façade of the Louvre—nor have attempted to swell the catalogues we have of pictures, statues, and churches”. Rather, his will be “a quiet journey of the heart in pursuit of NATURE” – or, more characteristically, in search of the “exquisite” sensations to be derived from “melancholy” encounters with similarly affective others (2002, 111, 57, 149). This, as Elizabeth Bohls observes, was a “manifesto for a new kind of travel”, resistant to the systematising impulses of traditional guidebooks (2005, 105). In Carl Thompson’s reading, this turn in Sterne, and in sentimentalism more broadly, was principally subjective: he notes, for instance, Sterne’s attempt to convey “the raw flux of a consciousness” and the “pronounced concern with the narratorial self in the sentimental manner pioneered by Sterne” (2011, 113, 116). As Carey’s own series of sentimental encounters also suggests, though, the “inward turn” during this period was not purely subjective but, also, inter-personal, especially in works that drew on the discourse of sentimentalism. While moving towards the interiorised subject-position later associated with Romanticism, this sentimental mode typically presented its affective subjects conversing with a series of (usually distressed) individuals, within liminal spaces located somewhere in-between the solitary and the social.¹⁹

Even so, Carey’s incorporation of this affective mode introduced into The Balnea a form of writing that, on the face of it, appeared inimical to the objective of producing a new kind of systematic survey-guidebook. As the example of Sterne suggests, its sentimental register also brought the work into the ambit of more clearly fictionalised travel literature. While the sentimental travelogues published in the wake of Sterne were usually set on the Continent, a number of such works instead focused, like Carey, on England and its leisure resorts. Two examples can be cited to illustrate the key points of consonance with and divergence from this discourse in the pages of The Balnea itself. Published in 1787, Hardwicke Lewis’ An Excursion to Margate is organised around a single sentimental relationship between the narrator and Maria, whom he first meets on the hoy from London. Having been married off to a man she doesn’t love (as opposed to her beloved Charles, with whom she’s conducting a clandestine affair), Maria has travelled to the coast to end her life. The narrator helps to rescue her following a dramatic cliff-top leap into the sea; thereafter, she relates her history and they enter into a temporary friendship, before Maria departs suddenly, leaving only a letter and an enclosed note, confessing all. A decade earlier, Peregrine Phillips’ A Sentimental Diary (1778), which is mainly set in Brighton, incorporated an extended affective episode involving Susan and her beloved William, a fisherman. In the single-volume first edition, the narrator watches a brig struggling in the water from his clifftop vantage point, where he enters into conversation with another onlooker, an anxious “young maiden” (Susan) whose “true-hearted William” is on board the vessel (1778, 69–70). Having listened to her story, and compared the couple fancifully with Othello and Desdemona, the narrator quotes an enduring line from A Sentimental Journey by way of reassurance: “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb” (71).²⁰ By contrast to Carey’s tragic tale of the “beautiful young damsel”, Phillips’ narrator is able to confirm the next day that the ship arrived safely; he even returns to the scene to shake hands with William himself. The tale is continued in a second edition of 1780, which added a sequel volume and a frontispiece illustration of the narrator and Susan, watching William’s ship from the cliffs above. Susan, alone, now has “an infant at her breast” (1780, 2:80); she and William had married, but he and his father have both been pressed into naval service (William as punishment for hiding his father from the press-gang). Once Susan completes this update to her personal history, the narrator immediately rushes off and secures the pair’s release. His rhetoric at this point is suggestive of both affective sympathy and (self-)satisfaction at beneficent accomplishment: “Envy me, Reader—I feast luxuriously!” (2:86).

These tales share key sentimental features with those in Carey’s Balnea: narratorial encounters with individuals, who relate their personal histories; the emotional travails of thwarted lovers and men in service (or unwillingly pressed into service); attempts at offering practical help; the gratitude shown by recipients of charity; narrative evocations of pathos through heightened rhetoric and stylistic devices (dashes, exclamation marks). The Balnea differs to some degree from these particular examples of the sub-genre in containing a series of such moments, rather than a single (if more extensive) episode. Yet the most crucial difference between the works concerns the textual use that is made of these affective encounters. For, Carey turns each of the sentimental moments I have outlined from The Balnea into a song: “The Disconsolate Sailor”; “The Furloughed Soldier”; “Allen Brooke, of Wyndermere”; “Maid of the Rock”; “Young Spring Water Cresses”. The partial exception to this process involves the tale of Fido and his owner, which is instead turned to verse.²¹ The endings to some of these episodes suggest the extent to which Carey’s art of sentimental balladry is parasitic on the sufferings of the nation’s dispossessed, bereft and abandoned. Ever on the lookout for suitable material, he recalls how he turned the tragedy of the bereaved lover to advantage: “Though struck with the malady which attended this poor ill-fated fair one, yet it presented itself as no improper Thesis; out of which I produced the following song … ” (1799a, 212). The effect of the tale of the abandoned lover, likewise, is to “set my Muse afloat” (189). By contrast to other sentimental travel-writing of the period, this segue from affective narrative to popular song constitutes a key element within The Balnea’s own sentimental discourse. Yet it also registers in the work as problematic. Across these sentimental vignettes, the travelling ballad-writer appears only too ready to adapt the affecting personal histories of those he encounters to his own, professional ends.

Carey’s sentimental subject matter is also put to another use which further distracts from his stated intention to produce “a kind of Chart” of the nation’s resort destinations. Entwined with The Balnea’s discourse of sympathetic feeling and associated ballads is an authorial attempt to establish ownership of the songs themselves. In the opening “Apology” to the work, this proprietary claim is itself couched in sentimental, almost novelistic terms. As Carey puts it, many of these pieces “have been seen like poor wandering foundlings, thrown upon the world without their real parent’s name being known, and none to tell to whom they belong” (1799a, vii). In a further “eccentric” departure from his central subject, Carey repeatedly outlines his grievances about the lack of credit he has received for authorship of the songs. Regarding “The Disconsolate Sailor”, for instance, he complains that “public report” has “frequently bestowed that merit upon another man, who does not deserve it” (85). This false ascription of authorial paternity is to one “whose trade is only writing songs in bad English, and singing them with a worse voice”. Ratcheting up the rhetoric of injustice, Carey declaims: “Is it to be supposed that there is only one man in the world that can write a song?” (85). Following the encounter with the “beautiful young damsel” at Ambleside, similarly, Carey elaborates that the “reputation” of the associated song, “Allen Brooke, of Wyndermere”, “has also been given to the singing-bird of Leicester-place; as if there were no other shrubs seen, nor birds heard to sing, than those that are in Kensington-Gardens, because they are so often visited” (190–1). The target in both of these passages, as the reviewers registered, is Charles Dibdin, whose Sans Souci theatricals took place at Leicester-place during the later 1790s. In tandem with the inclusion of new sentimental anecdotes, Carey’s irritation over the misattribution of his songs is further elaborated in The Balnea’s second edition. An account of the origins of “Young Spring Water Cresses” here generates complaints about plagiarism and the lack of recognition of Carey’s own creative genius: “This song has been pirated by a manufacturer of songs, who writes them by contract for the manager of Vauxhall” (1799b, 126–7). In the lead-up to “The Shepherd and his Dog”, Carey defensively asserts his authorship of its verses: “lest it may be thought that I selected them from some other author, they were inserted with my name to them in the Morning Herald, about three years ago” (196–7).²² Returning to material included in the first edition, a final additional paragraph on the art of song-writing also makes further insinuations about a song-writer – unnamed, but clearly Dibdin (“the nautical poet in question”) – who had been credited with Carey’s own compositions, here particularly “Allen Brooke, of Wyndermere” (214).

Carey may well have been justified in his complaints about misattributions. There is little doubt that the songs in question were actually written by him. A number of them had been published under his name or credited to Carey previously, in some cases 10–15 years earlier. In printing “ALLEN BROOKE, of WINDERMERE”, for instance, the General Advertiser for 16 June 1785 indicated that this was “A favourite SONG, Sung by Mrs. KENNEDY, at VAUXHALL. Written by Mr. GEORGE SAVILLE CAREY. Set by Mr. HOOK” (1785, 3). This confirms Carey’s assertion in The Balnea that the ballad had been “sung by the late Mrs. Kennedy at Vauxhall, some years ago” (1799a, 189). An advertisement in The World for 25 October 1787, likewise, confirms Carey’s authorship of “his much admired Song of ‘The Disconsolate Sailor,’” which was to be given by Carey “in Character” at a benefit concert at the Royalty Theatre (1787, 1).²³ Some looseness, though, appears to have crept into attributions of the pieces in the 1790s. During this decade, for instance, “Allen Brooke, of Windermere” was variously reprinted either with no ascription or with an attribution to an unspecified “EMMA”.²⁴ Although Carey had complained, somewhat vaguely, of the errors of “public report” and popular “reputation”, rather than misattributions in published texts, a number of printed sources also support Carey’s particular objections regarding “The Disconsolate Sailor”. During the 1790s, the song was credited to Dibdin both indirectly, as in British Songster, or, Dibdin’s Delight, which is said to contain “THE MOST APPROVED SONGS OF DIBDIN, AND OTHER CELEBRATED AUTHORS” (1793, title-page), and more directly, as in Poor Jack’s Garland, which reprints “The Disconsolate Sailor” as one of six songs by Dibdin specifically ([1795], 4–5). Carey’s criticism of a “manufacturer of songs” who had pirated “Young Spring Water Cresses” might possibly refer to William Upton, the apparent author of a bowdlerised version of the song (“Come, Buy My Water Cresses”) that was printed in The Ladies’ own Memorandam-book as “Written by Mr. Upton” ([1794], non. pag.). More broadly, Carey might have shared some of Dibdin’s concerns about attacks upon his own authorship of certain songs, or simply have felt emboldened in his complaints by Dibdin’s embroilment in a series of libel trials in the early 1790s, following accusations that he had plagiarised songs by a former collaborator, Isaac Bickerstaff.²⁵

Even as The Balnea’s anecdotal encounters register as particularising moments of “situation” and “feeling”, then, they also advanced other authorial agendas. This focus on not just sentimental distresses but songs derived from them and complaints about their misattribution has a number of effects in the work. Most immediately, the studied pathos of these scenarios is somewhat undercut by their role within Carey’s ongoing rivalry with Charles Dibdin and other false claimants on Carey’s output. Carey himself seems to have become more conscious of the ethical difficulty posed by his professional use of other people’s distresses: the third edition contains no new material of this kind. One new anecdote in the affective register of sentiment relates the death of a gentleman, but in this case Carey is not personally involved. Instead, the episode involves a double temporal remove: the incident itself occurred “about thirty years” earlier, while Carey’s visit to the site of the gentleman’s demise had seen him “rambling over these scenes, about the year 1783” – some eighteen years before the publication of the third edition itself (1801, 49). Some final amendments to the “Maid of the Rock” episode may also have been intended to leaven the sense of Carey as a versifying opportunist upon others’ miseries. Where he had previously been “struck with the malady which attended this poor ill-fated fair one”, he is now “shocked with the misfortune which attended this poor ill-fated fair one” (224). Albeit via some minor verbal changes, this revision appears designed to convey a more strongly emotional reaction to the woman’s tragedy, rather than the kind of intrigued detachment on display in the earlier editions.

If Carey sought by these changes to offset the appearance of instrumentality in his narrative’s sentimentalism, a further problematic effect of this material yet remained. As a reader might well wonder: what is the exact relationship here between the travelogue and the guidebook? Just as Carey’s sentimental vignettes were not the kinds of replicable experiences that might be expected of a survey-style brochure, his fixation on possible misattributions of the ballads tied to these encounters struck critics as especially eccentric – less a sentimental particularity than a Shandean hobby-horse, of little interest to anyone bar the author himself.²⁶ More specifically, as readers might also have asked: what is the chronological ordering, or temporal sequence, of Carey’s narrative of his travels? The third edition’s pinpointing of new recollections to “about” 1783 is unusually precise: in the first edition especially, the dating of the earlier sentimental encounters had been vaguer. The meeting with the disconsolate sailor is situated “some years ago” (1799a, 80); that with the furloughed soldier “one rainy day” (154) and then two years later, for the second song possibly relating to the same figure. The encounter with the “damsel” is not initially dated; only after the narration of the episode itself do we learn that the associated song was sung “some years ago” (189). In a more Romantic vein, meanwhile, Carey and his friend are said to have happened upon the maid of the rock “one moon-light evening” (211). Given the external evidence for the dating of some of the linked songs, a number of these encounters must have taken place during the mid-to-late 1780s, and perhaps earlier.²⁷ The sentimental additions to the second edition seemingly describe more recent events. The water-cress-seller is encountered “at a time” when Carey had the idea of addressing the King regarding a pension (1799b, 110); a letter supporting the claim is included in The Balnea and dated to 1795 (117). As noted earlier, Carey had also published “The Shepherd and his Dog” in the Morning Herald “about three years ago”. Even so, the affective encounters gathered across these editions of the work, which formed the putative basis for its songs and verses, often seem to belong to an earlier moment than the Balnea-as-guidebook, which in parts at least is geared towards providing up-to-date information for the would-be tourist.

Such composite chronology was not necessarily unusual and could have productive formal and aesthetic effects. As Barbara Korte notes, for instance, although Defoe’s domestic Tour (published 1724–26) was a “synthesis of various journeys” undertaken over “several years”, the work itself “presents these journeys … in such a way as to give the impression of a single travelling experience” (2000, 74).²⁸ While Carey doesn’t himself claim that his sentimental anecdotes relate to a single tour of the country, The Balnea’s own composite chronology is not as convincing as Defoe’s. Rather, the interrelated elements here – the sentimental mode of representation, the imprecise dating of the encounters, and their connection to particular songs and their misattribution – tend to raise doubts about the veracity of the narrative itself. Presented as real-life reportage, the vignettes sometimes strain credulity. The very recurrence of these encounters with stock sentimental subjects, such as (beautiful) heartbroken women, might be regarded as suspicious – the stuff of fiction, rather than real-life travel. Sentimental travel-writing of the period often combined fact and fiction in uncertain quantities and to uneven effect, as the examples cited earlier demonstrate. The tale of Susan and William in Phillips’ A Sentimental Diary, certainly, is less clearly based in reality than some of the other material in the work. More problematically, an opening “Advertisement” to Lewis’ An Excursion to Margate not only asks readers to “consider the Journey as actually made” but contends that even the sentimental tale of Maria is “not the mere Flight of Imagination, but embellished Truth” (1787, non. pag.). The point here is not that sentimentalism was incapable of describing actual events, but that it offered a stylised representation, even of purportedly true or real travelling, that was often indistinguishable from scenarios included in more overtly fictional writing, not least sentimental novels. The other key element in Carey’s sentimental discourse, his (misattributed) ballads, tends only to compound the issue. As these songs show, the stock subjects of sentimental writing were also prevalent in popular song: the plights of the poor; lovers’ distresses; the hardships of sailors and soldiers. One odd implication of Carey’s narrative is that such songs had their origins in personal experiences. That every sentimental interaction recorded in the work is attached to a song or verse might itself elicit scepticism about their veracity. As a reader might finally wonder, therefore: did Carey turn all such distressing encounters into songs? Was he here recording, incrementally, only the sentimental episodes that he did subsequently re-fashion in this manner? Or might he perhaps be guilty instead of reverse engineering: of crafting these hazily dated anecdotes to match his sentimental ballads of the preceding decades, which he wished to lay authorial claim to in his latest book?

Conclusion

The three editions of The Balnea mark a significant step in the development of the guidebook to English leisure resorts, from localised accounts to general overviews. At the same time, I have been arguing, Carey’s text is also an irregular work, which struggles to assert its exemplarity within the (sub-)genre it originates. An “eccentric” narrative, it enfolds “extraneous” interests and geographical deviations from its own “Balnearean system”. Both travelogue and guidebook, it offers neither a clear record of the author’s own journeying nor a full survey of the available resorts. Setting itself up as impartial, it struggles to fashion a disinterested point-of-view. The personal anecdotes it relates, meanwhile, generate questions and suspicions on account of their loose dating and ordering, their sentimental subject-matter and mode of representation, and the way Carey enlists them to authenticate, and claim ownership of, a clutch of popular songs. Nevertheless, through its very novelty and idiosyncrasies, The Balnea also touches suggestively on issues of perennial interest in studies of travel writing in this period: the impact of Enlightenment modes of knowledge production and organisation; the fact / fiction dynamic; the relationship between travelling and travel writing; the development of guidebooks themselves. More particularly, Carey’s employment of sentimental motifs and techniques highlights that the “inward turn” within travel writing also involved an interpersonal “affective turn” which partly facilitated, partly resisted this pronounced concentration on the self. To this extent, within later eighteenth-century sentimental writing, this key development in the genre might more precisely be termed an “inward tilt”. And yet, however much it might have differed from the “utterly unique subjectivity” associated with Romantic travel (Allen 1996, 214), this sentimental strain was itself at odds with The Balnea’s opening manifesto for a new type of guidebook brochure: one that would furnish readers with the kind of factual information necessary for selecting a summer’s leisure destination.

Following the flurry of initial reviews, The Balnea would attract only occasional interest. Extracts were sometimes included in local guidebooks, such as The Chichester Guide (1804) – a later edition of a work Carey had himself borrowed from in the third edition of The Balnea. In the opening pages of his curtailed Cambrian Balnea (1825), T.J. Llewelyn Prichard would also quote Carey’s observations on the partialities of local inhabitants and hirelings, and on the balance of beauties and defects, in order to establish his own work’s “principle of independence, adherence to facts, and general fidelity of description”, and eschewal of either “invidious preponderance or undue partiality” (1825, 7–8).²⁹ Revealingly, Prichard says nothing about the actual account of English watering-places that had followed Carey’s high-sounding preface. A more personal note would be struck in the autobiography published in 1850 by John Britton, a topographer and antiquary who, in 1830, had edited Anstey’s New Bath Guide. Recalling his acquaintance with Carey, Britton affirmed that The Balnea was “the first work that gave a general account of those famed places of fashionable resort”. He was slightly less secure on the work’s title, which he recalled as “‘Balnea, or Sketches of Watering-places’” (1850, 320). This mis-remembered title seems to conflate Carey’s primary focus with his secondary method, his account of the resorts with the “Sketches” and “Anecdotes” that had filled out the work. If Britton’s memory was not quite accurate, his recollection does usefully reveal the impression that The Balnea left on at least one interested reader, of a series of “sketches” which lacked the scope or rigour that would characterise subsequent surveys of England’s touristic hot-spots.

Beyond being quoted in Prichard’s Cambrian Balnea, it can easily appear that Carey had little influence on subsequent survey-guidebooks. The period between The Balnea and Granville’s Spas of England saw the printing of a number of broad guides to spas and sea-bathing resorts. Some of these works concentrated on specific geographical areas, some on the medical efficacy of water treatments, while others attempted complete surveys. The next survey-guidebooks to appear were A Companion to the Watering and Bathing Places of England (1800), which preceded Carey’s third edition, and John Feltham’s A Guide to all the Watering and Sea-bathing Places (1803), which would go through multiple editions in succeeding decades. These works departed most visibly from Carey in being organised alphabetically, eschewing the structure of a personal journey to offer, in effect, a series of mini-guides to the resorts. Together, the Companion and the Guide also staged a movement towards the survey-guidebook as compilation: both incorporate a significant amount of material from existing texts, mainly guidebooks to individual resorts but also other titles, including The Balnea itself. While neither work directly mentions The Balnea, Carey’s contribution to the genre also informs these survey-guides in more fundamental ways. The Companion, for instance, purports to be offering a fair yet candid account of the “merits and defects” of each destination, such that the “lover of balneation” might decide to which of the “balneary resorts” to “direct his route” (1800, [iii]) – the echoes of Carey’s title revealing the origin of such claims. Carey’s influence is also discernible in Feltham’s Guide, both in its posited scope (as an account of “all” the watering-places) and in the aims outlined in its prefatory “Advertisement”, which casts the work as a brochure for those wondering “where their leisure may be the most agreeably spent, or their health the most completely restored” (1803, iv) – a positioning that would become a staple of the genre.³⁰ We might speculate that the producers of these works saw a publishing opportunity within the gap in Carey’s own text, between its stated aim of comprehensiveness and the sketchiness, and personalising sentimentalism, of its actual coverage.³¹ And yet, in their more systematic organisation and the positioning of their creators as mere editors, the Companion and the Guide also highlight what would be lost in such information-driven guidebooks: the sense of a developing narrative, of the travel undertaken to produce the work, and of the individual author themselves. It would take a figure such as Augustus Granville to synthesise all of these elements successfully within a single guidebook to the nation’s watering-places.

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Notes

1 On the ‘home tour’ during this period, see for instance Ousby (1990); Korte (2000), chapter 4; Kinsley (2008).

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 (2022, 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” (1801, 63), which had mostly appeared previously in Carey’s Rural Ramble (1777), 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 (1993, 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” (2002, 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” (2001, 62).

7 I allude here to contemporary attempts to envision a comprehensive, disinterested viewpoint, as discussed in Barrell (1983).

8 These figures include reprintings of the same work.

9 Smollett to William Huggins, 2 July 1758 (1970, 69). Hume would later make a similar claim in “My Own Life” ([1985] 1987, xxxvii). On the varying bases of historians’ claims to impartiality during this period, see also Smitten (1985).

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” (2018, 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 (2017).

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” (1974, 76). On anxieties about social mixing at Margate and the particular perils of the hoys, see also Guest (2017).

14 This poem is actually a reprise of Carey’s “Poetical Tagg” on Brighton, first published with his Rural Ramble (1777).

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 (1799b, 217).

16 See, for comparison, Mavor (1781, 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 (2020).

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” (2022, 2). On sentimental travel narratives and the influence of Sterne, see also Newbould (2013), chapter 2; Turner (2001), 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” (1988, 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 (2002), 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 (1799a, 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 (2018).

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 (1978, 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.