The Wandering Minstrel: An Eighteenth-Century Fiction?
Patricia Howard, Open University
Volume 13, no. 1, October 2000
©McMaster University, 2015. All articles published on the Eighteenth-Century Fiction website are protected by copyright held by Eighteenth-Century Fiction, a journal published by the Faculty of Humanities at McMaster University.
ABSTRACT
“Of all the various productions of the press, none are so eagerly received … as the writings of travellers.” Travellers’ tales formed one of the most popular genres of eighteenth-century literature. The fact that travel itself was becoming easier and safer stimulated rather than quenched the thirst for descriptions of serious scientific inquiries, accounts of the Grand Tour, quests for romantic landscape, and investigations into the curious manners and customs of societies near and far. Travel books were published in proliferation, widely read, and frequently referred to by other travellers, so that a chain of reception can often be established. A seminal text, Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several parts of Italy (1705) shaped the aims and ambitions of many travellers embarking on their own tours, Boswell among them: “I shall certainly take Addison’s Travels with me, as you hint. I shall read them abroad, with high relish.” Almost as influential, and not only with musicians, were Charles Burney’s two journals, The Present State of Music in France and Italy (1771) and The Present State of Music in Germany, the Netherlands, and United Provinces (1773). Such works were read throughout Europe, and national pride was often wounded by the readiness of authors to pronounce on the countries and customs they visited so fleetingly. Johann Friedrich Reichardt, who wrote accounts of his own musical journeys, twice attacked Burney’s imperfect knowledge and faulty judgment, declaring that “I would state openly that Mr Burney is a poor observer of things musical.” (Burney’s reply was more subtly phrased: “Reichardt is an animated and rapid writer and composer … a patriotic and decisive critic.”)
Other ECF articles on the topic of “Travel Narratives” include:
“Seeing something that was doing in the World”: The Form of History in Colonel Jack
by RUTH MACK (ECF 24.2, Winter 2011-12)
The Trans-National Dimensions of the Émigré Novel during the French Revolution
by KATHERINE ASTBURY (ECF 23.4, Summer 2011)
The Exchanged Portrait and the Lethal Picture: Visualization Techniques and Native Knowledge in Samuel Hearne’s Sketches from His Trek to the Arctic Ocean and John Webber’s Record of the Northern Pacific
by PHILIPPE DESPOIX (ECF 23.4, Summer 2011)
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