Travel writing and Wales

In 1766, Swiss philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau was strongly advised by his circle of correspondents against his yearning to undertake a journey to Wales. Rousseau believed that Wales “entirely resembled” his native Switzerland, and he had fervently hoped that it would become his final resting place. Yet Bunbury (1965–1998), for example, warns in a letter that in Wales “it rains too much”, and he “shall see nothing but mountains and wild goats” (273). In the almost unanimous view of Rousseau's international network of correspondents, a journey to “wild” Wales could only bring him new suffering.¹

Nevertheless, the following decade witnessed a decisive shift in attitudes regarding the desirability of travel to Wales, particularly amongst British travellers. Most scholars agree that in the 1770s perceptions changed from predominantly negative views of Wales as an inaccessible terrain and backward nation² to a growing appreciation of its distinctive landscape and ancient culture. Historian Prys Morgan (2001) argues that this period constituted “one of the greatest shifts in the stereotyping of Wild Wales, away from the hostile image of incivility to one of admiration” (274). This decade also saw the publication of the first part of Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales in 1778, “perhaps the single most important textual influence upon English attitudes toward travel in Wales” (Lichtenwalner 2008, 97). Pennant's reimagining of Wales in “ways that were alluring to burgeoning Romantic sensibilities” (Lichtenwalner 2008, 98) in turn stimulated further travel to Wales. During the second half of the eighteenth century “English sympathy for things Welsh rose to a high point” (Morgan 2001, 265), as Welsh culture became a respectable object of scholarly pursuit. This growing interest in Wales's rich history manifested itself in the rediscovery, extensive publication and translation into English of mediaeval Welsh literature. Societies set up in London to promote Welsh literature and culture further enhanced its popularity, and the work of antiquarian enthusiasts inspired new waves of travel to Wales.

Moreover, these more positive perceptions of Wales as a favoured travel destination were facilitated and reinforced by major improvements to the country's travel infrastructure, such as the establishment of turnpike roads from the end of the eighteenth century and the development of the railway network from the 1830s onwards, leading to a significant increase in the number of travellers. Proponents of picturesque tourism and Romantic travellers in search of the sublime were able to feast their eyes on the verdant and mountainous Welsh landscapes. Later nineteenth-century travellers also came to admire feats of engineering, such as Thomas Telford's Pontcysyllte aqueduct at Llangollen and his Menai Bridge, the crowning glory of the coach route to Ireland, connecting Anglesey to the mainland. Increasing numbers of travellers became keen to take advantage of what Katie Gramich has termed Wales's “accessible otherness” (2012, 147). Wales held a dual appeal for travellers, due to its proximity and familiarity as England's neighbour, but also due to perceptions of its exoticism and alterity, in particular cultural (the Welsh language) and geographical (the austere mountainous terrain).

Nevertheless, the textual traces left behind by these travellers to Wales have remained relatively unexplored in studies of travel writing on the British Isles. As Mary-Ann Constantine, one of the contributors to this volume, has observed in relation to the omission of Welsh sources from studies of British Romanticism:

Wales, it seems, has suffered from a chronic inbetweenness, being either too exotic (an unfamiliar language and a literature which rarely appears on any English syllabus) or not exotic enough (politically subsumed, and – language apart – not as challengingly ‘other’ as the Scottish Highlands or Ireland). (2008, 585–586)

This neglect may result partly from the less visible nature of travel narratives on Wales, which have often been incorporated into accounts of travel to and around England, and therefore remained submerged. This obfuscation is particularly noticeable in the case of works written in European languages, in which the terms for “England” and “English” are often used to refer to “England and Wales/Great Britain” and “English and Welsh/British”. Moreover, the accounts of journeys to Welsh ports which preface numerous travelogues on Ireland create an image of Wales as a point of departure, a transit zone rather than a site of encounters (see Davies and Pratt 2007, 1–2).

Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British travel accounts of journeys to Wales form part of the corpus relating to the “Home Tour”, which has been relatively well-researched in recent years. Nevertheless, in contrast to England, Scotland and Ireland, no single full-length study focusing on Wales has appeared to date. Important contributions towards the development of this field have been made, most notably by Gruffudd, Herbert and Piccini's article on early twentieth-century English-language travel literature on Wales (2000), and by Gramich's recent chapter (2012) examining travellers' constructions of Wales between 1844 and 1913. Other articles have focused predominantly on individual Romantic travellers, and have also been devoted to the seminal works of Thomas Pennant (often considered the “father” of tours of Wales), Mary Morgan (A Tour to Milford Haven, 1791) and George Borrow (Wild Wales, 1862).³ Yet such individual contributions notwithstanding, to a large extent travel writing on Wales remains an untapped resource which deserves much wider attention.

This special issue is part of this process of broadening the corpus and offering a more comprehensive view of travel writers' myriad ways of engaging with and representing Wales. It forms part of a major three-year collaborative research project between Bangor and Swansea Universities and the University of Wales Centre for Advanced Welsh and Celtic Studies, entitled “European Travellers to Wales: 1750–2010”. Funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the project examines perceptions and representations of Wales and “Welshness” in texts by European travellers, focusing on key points in the period of Welsh modernisation from the Industrial Revolution to the post-devolution era. The project will be a case study into the interactions in travel writing between major and “minority” cultures, nations and languages and minorities in periphery–periphery dialogues, whilst also exploring possible implications or paradigms for the study of “invisible” cultures and ways of restoring their visibility. As well as a co-authored study on the topic of Wales in European travel writing, there will also be a museum exhibition at the Ceredigion Museum, Aberystwyth in 2015 and a conference on 14–16 September 2015 at the National Library of Wales in Aberystwyth which will probe the nature of the relationship between “minority” cultures and travel beyond the Welsh context.⁴

The first output from the project, this special issue of Studies in Travel Writing, is in many ways a starting point in the process of rendering travel literature on Wales more visible. The special issue begins in the pivotal decade of the 1770s and ends by considering twenty-first-century responses to Wales. The essays investigate a wide range of published and unpublished sources, including travelogues, letters, memoirs, diaries and fictional narratives. Moreover, the special issue moves beyond the predominant English-centric focus of previous studies by also investigating accounts of travel to Wales by travellers from Brittany, Ireland, the Basque country, Germany, Poland, Czechoslovakia and Quebec. The accounts of journeys to Wales under investigation here encompass a wide range of motivations for travel, including linguistic curiosity, family obligations, admiration for Wales's cultural heritage, appreciation of its sublime landscapes, as well as more pragmatic visits by writers in search of fresh material. The essays also consider the perspectives of travellers who did not initially choose Wales as their destination, thereby highlighting the importance of Wales as a site of refuge from conflict and political upheaval.

The accounts of travel to north and south Wales by female travellers discussed in the first essay by Sarah Prescott span a significant period both in the history of travel writing and of shifting perceptions of Wales, “from a backward and uncivilised land to a place venerated for its ancient bardic culture and sublime landscapes”, in ways which parallel representations of the Scottish highlands in the same period. In her analysis of spatial constructions and familial connections in Hester Lynch Thrale Piozzi's unpublished “Journal of a Tour in Wales” (1774), Mary Morgan's epistolary A Tour to Milford Haven (1791), and Elizabeth Isabella Spence's letter collection Summer Excursions (1809), Prescott detects a growing tendency to interpret experiences of Wales through literary frames of reference. This points towards a more complex relationship between empirical observations of Wales as an increasingly popular travel destination and the various cultural and literary precedents which shape the travellers' responses.

One of the main aims of the wider project on “European Travellers to Wales” is to consider the degree to which European perceptions of Wales have been influenced or mediated by travelling texts. The role played by translations into European languages, in particular French and German, of English-language travel narratives and guidebooks, most notably Thomas Pennant's A Tour in Wales, George Borrow's Wild Wales and William Gilpin's picturesque Observations on the River Wye and Several Parts of South Wales (1782), is central in this respect. Alison Martin's insightful case study explores the reception in German translation of Samuel Jackson Pratt's openly sentimental, Sterneian Gleanings through Wales, Holland and Westphalia (1795), the Welsh section of which appeared in German translation in 1798 as Aehrenlese auf einer Reise durch Wallis. The essay traces the history of the translation of Pratt's poeticised account, and the resulting image of Wales is the “product of multifaceted and multicultural mediation”. Martin suggests that the English original and its significantly altered and reshaped German translation serve quite different purposes for their respective reading publics. By contrast with the familiar English reading of Wales centring on the aesthetics of the picturesque and the sentimental, Martin suggests that the German translator was working to an agenda more obviously indebted to Pierre Bourdieu's “objective” categories of regionality, such as economic activity, territory and religion.

The special issue goes beyond the centre–periphery relationships and major–minor dichotomies found in many studies of travel writing to analyse periphery–periphery relations, notably through the significant role played by Breton travellers to Wales. The cultural similarities between Wales and Brittany date back as far as the fifth-century migration of Saints southwards from Britain to the westernmost tip of the continent. The rediscovery of these similarities lies behind a new era of cultural exchange and contact between the two regions that began in post-Romantic times, and continued throughout the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, as we will see in Kathryn N. Jones's contribution. Mary-Ann Constantine's essay discusses a seminal moment of cultural exchange between Wales and Brittany: the 1838 tour made by the young Breton viscount Hersart de la Villemarqué to south Wales, in search of manuscripts to fill gaps in the lost Breton literary tradition. Drawing on the mostly unpublished letters that he wrote home to his family, the essay investigates his sojourns at the homes of culturally influential hosts Lady Llanover (Augusta Hall), Lady Charlotte Guest at Dowlais and the Vivians at Singleton. Constantine argues that this tour, in particular his exposure to a burgeoning Welsh Celticism and the experience of being made a “bard” at the Eisteddfod of the Abergavenney Cymreigyddion Society, had a major influence on La Villemarqué's efforts to invigorate the Breton language and culture, most notably with the publication of his infamous Barzaz Breiz in 1839.

In a significant number of travel accounts, perceptions of Wales are frequently filtered through comparisons with other nations, chiefly its more familiar dominant English neighbour. Adrian Byrne's essay, which juxtaposes the perspective of an Englishman with that of a Welshman who was one of the central figures of the late Victorian Welsh cultural renaissance (though himself based in England), demonstrates the value of moving beyond such a view of Wales. Deploying Benedict Anderson's concept of an “imagined nation” (1991), Byrne's examination of nationhood in George Borrow's by now canonical Wild Wales (1862) and O.M. Edwards's Home Tour of Cartrefi Cymru (“Homes of Wales”, 1896) investigates how both texts use the past to inform perceptions of nineteenth-century Wales. Whereas Borrow foregrounds the Romantic idyll and turns to the past as a paradigm, Edwards offers a vision of emergent modernity and cultural development based on Welsh national literary and cultural heritage. Byrne maintains that the resulting imaginings of Wales appeal to two distinct groups: Borrow imagines a neo-romantic Wales intended to appeal to the cultured outsider in search of an “elective identity”, whilst Edwards tends towards an essentialist vision of Wales as a respectable, non-Conformist haven of Victorian values and cultural exclusivity.

The theme of Celtic connections also resonates in Andrew J. Garavel's examination of Beggars on Horseback: A Riding Tour of North Wales (1895) by the Irish cousins Edith Somerville and Violet Martin, namely the writers known as E.Œ. Somerville and Martin Ross. This deliberately light-hearted commissioned account of their fortnight's journey on wayward hired ponies in June 1893 is characterised by the authors' diffidence in relation to their subject and to themselves as travellers. The remote and rural areas of north Wales which they traverse embody an escape from the modern world, and in comparison with their Irish homeland Wales is praised for its greater respect for the past, sense of national dignity, and indifference towards the “dubious pleasures of modern tourism”. The essay traces the influence of American author Mark Twain's style of humour on the travel writing of Somerville and Ross, and in particular their off-handed, ironic and self-deprecating tone. Garavel concludes that Beggars on Horseback represents “a kind of anti-travel book” which satirises guidebook conventions and foregrounds the travellers' travails, intended less for the prospective traveller than the reader determined to stay at home.

Whereas most of the writers discussed in this special issue visit Wales for reasons of leisure or pleasure, Carol Tully's examination of involuntary travel to Wales reminds us of calls to open up the genre of travel literature to encompass a wider range of “travel stories” (Clifford 1997, 38) as records of cultural interaction. Her essay explores a wide range of texts dealing with the experience of exile travel to Wales in the mid-twentieth century, and identifies significant differences in terms of national and generational responses. The isolated, parallel existence of Basque Republican children escaping the Spanish Civil War is juxtaposed with the more negative experience of integration and estrangement of Jewish children fleeing Nazi Germany. By contrast, the adult memoirs of Polish artist Josef Herman and the letters of the German–Czech Jewish writer H.G. Adler and his wife Bettina Gross portray almost wholly positive experiences of Wales as a welcoming place of refuge. Finally, two (auto)biographically inflected fictional narratives by H.G. Adler and W.G. Sebald underline the complexity of the exile experience of travel, and Tully argues that the ensuing image of Wales oscillates between “the benign solidity of community, tradition and security and the dark, uncompromising location of myth and religious restraint”.

The final essay brings us to the present day, and considers how Wales is perceived by contemporary travellers in the new post-devolution political context. Kathryn N. Jones explores the evolving constructions of Wales, “Welshness” and Welsh political structures at the dawn of the twenty-first century offered by two francophone travel narratives. Her essay compares and contrasts the perceptions of the Quebecois first-time visitor Dominic Ménard-Bilodeau in Pays de Galles: Séjour dans un monde oublié (2004) with the longer-term perspective of Breton Jean-Yves Le Disez in Une aventure galloise: Portrait d'une petite nation solidaire (2006), and it investigates how the travellers' divergent discursive axes and respective emphases on heritage and ethnic tourism result in polarised views of present-day Wales. Ménard-Bilodeau offers a romanticised view of a verdant Wales of the past, a mysterious and largely unknown land with a strange and incomprehensible language. Conversely, Le Disez highlights Wales's cultural wealth and political and linguistic strength, a vibrant and dynamic model to be emulated by non-state nations such as Brittany. Le Disez's account in particular suggests a new political awareness of Wales in response to devolution, as well as the possibility of more politically engaged modes of travel to Wales. Jones concludes by calling for further comparative study regarding responses by travel writers to other post-devolution nations. Indeed, several of the works examined in this special issue draw attention to a potential political function of travel writing, with the genre used as a vehicle to call for the cultural and linguistic revival of non-state cultures and lesser-used languages in particular. It is hoped that the special issue and the wider research project of which it is part will offer fresh perspectives and open up new avenues of enquiry regarding the relationship between travel, travel writing, and perceptions and representations of “minority” cultures.

Acknowledgement

The guest editors would like to gratefully acknowledge the support of the Arts and Humanities Research Council for the “European Travellers to Wales: 1750–2010” research project. This special issue constitutes the first output from the project.

Notes

1. In the face of this opposition, Rousseau's plan fell through, and he never set foot in Wales. See Williams (2013a, 2013b).

2. To take one often-cited example: in Trip to North-Wales (1701), commonly attributed to Ned Ward, Wales is described as “the fag-end of Creation; the very rubbish of Noah's flood” (6).

3. See, for example, Davies and Pratt (2007), Lichtenwalner (2008), Kinsley (2012) and Hyde (2004).

4. For additional details about the project and up-to-date information about the conference and accompanying exhibition, see http://www.etw.bangor.ac.uk.