Proposed ‘Curious Travellers’ Panel for ETW Minority Cultures Conference
This panel will present some early findings from the AHRC-funded project, “Curious
Travellers: Thomas Pennant and the Welsh and Scottish Tour 1760-1820” .
Ffion Jones, CAWCS: Thomas Pennant: A travelling Welshman [DS Cyflwynir y
papur hwn yn y Gymraeg]
A descendant of an ancient Welsh family, Thomas Pennant, like most men and women of
his social class, lived the life of an English gentleman. To what extent did this condition
his approach, as a traveller and travel writer, to the Welsh cultural and linguistic
landscape? How far did his knowledge of the Welsh language extend? Was he totally
dependent on other Welshmen (most notably John Lloyd of Caerwys) for his insights into
the unique properties of Wales as a country apart from neighbouring England? Using
evidence from his correspondence, this paper will attempt to address the question of
Pennant’s Welsh credentials (both linguistic and cultural). In doing so, it will also
consider, briefly, his approach to language and culture in his travels in Scotland. Were his
preparations for his Scottish tours significantly different from those for his tours of Wales
and, if so, did this difference reflect Pennant’s greater awareness of Welsh cultural issues
and suggest a sensitivity, born of his Welshness, towards ‘minority’ cultures?
Elizabeth Edwards, CAWCS: ‘[B]leak and desolate as anything I have seen in
Scotland’: Mary Brunton on the home tour
Presenting some early findings from the ‘Curious Travellers’ research project, this paper
introduces Mary Brunton’s posthumously-published 1815 tour of England and Wales.
Brunton (1778-1818), a novelist, was from the Orkney Islands, moving to Edinburgh on
her marriage in 1798. She kept the horizons of her Scottish homeland very much in view
as she travelled through England and Wales in 1815, using Scotland as a gauge against
which to measure the new people, industries, and landscapes she encountered on her tour.
Brunton’s transperipheral perspective on the domestic tour is a central feature of this text,
but it’s also just one element of the 1815 tour’s layered and miscellaneous intellectual
landscape. This paper suggests that three major, interconnected themes flow through this
text. First, the tour is a space for empirical observation and the construction of knowledge
(as for example in Brunton’s descriptions of porcelain manufacturing in the Midlands).
Second, it’s a space for aesthetic, social, and political critique, often framed in
comparative terms: the virtues of Tintern Abbey versus Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire;
the relative poverties of Welsh and English cottagers; the parallel properties, physical and
moral, of Llangollen and the Scottish Highlands. Finally, it’s a record of the imagination
on the move, creatively braiding topographical reportage, ethnographic and economic
profiling, scientific curiosity, and moral or ideological reflection by means of a highly
literary register perhaps not surprising given Brunton’s career as a novelist.
Mary-Ann Constantine, CAWCS: ‘To find out all its beauties, a man must travel on
foot’: Catherine Hutton’s explorations of Wales’
Catherine Hutton (1756-1846) was a Birmingham-based novelist and prolific letterwriter, a friend (and fellow Unitarian) of Joseph Priestley, and the daughter of
Birmingham’s ‘first historian’, the bookseller William Hutton. She was also a keen
traveller within the British Isles, and recorded her tours in letters and narratives, some
published in journals like the Monthly Magazine, others woven into the plots of her
novels. She is a sharp observer of social conditions, and a witty commentator on the
foibles of those she encounters; the fact that (unlike many coach-bound lady tourists of
her time) she was often prepared to ride on horseback or even walk gives her accounts
considerable vigour. With her father, Catherine Hutton visited Wales several times, first
in 1787 and then in the period 1796-1800: the respective accounts of their experiences
(different genders, different generations) make interesting comparative reading, and form
the basis of this paper. But the Huttons’ responses to the Welsh landscape, language and
people, will also be situated both in the very particular tourist relationship that develops
in this period between the Midlands and Wales, as well as in the broader context of the
domestic tour’s ‘rediscovery’ of the non-English-speaking peripheries, and the
implications this has for writing the history, or histories, of different parts of Britain.