Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque

in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism

Austin, Linda Marilyn.

ELH, Volume 74, Number 3, Fall 2007, pp. 629-653 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/elh.2007.0021

For additional information about this article

http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/elh/summary/v074/74.3austin.html

Access Provided by University of Exeter at 11/10/10 2:30PM GMT

aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion
to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-century
English Tourism

by linda m. austin

The late twentieth-century indictment of tourism in Britain and

America, launched almost half a century ago by Daniel J. Boorstin,
has focused on the industry’s embrace of simulation and its tendency
to transform everything in its field into, as Jonathan Culler has writ-
ten, “a sign of itself, an instance of a cultural practice.”1 The suspicion
of the tour as an inauthentic experience is at least two centuries old,
however, and has guided the development of tourism as middle-class
recreation since the start of the nineteenth century.2 Inevitably this
suspicion affected the aesthetic experiences of tourists themselves.
The idea of travel as an exercise in the individual cultivation and
display of distinctive taste induced discomfort, even self-contempt,
among those of moderate means who were eager to emulate their
aristocratic predecessors and develop artistic appreciation and con-
noisseurship. They suffered from “touristic shame,” to use John Frow’s
words; and their shame educed what Dean MacCannell has called
a “rhetoric of moral superiority.”3 Although this rhetoric privileged
romantic conditions such as authenticity and autonomy, it depended
on prestigious aesthetic codes to structure individual experiences. It is
the self-conscious and often hapless deployment of these codes in the
second half of the nineteenth century that I shall examine. Not only
were the codes regularly undermined, but their users were frequently
embarrassed. This usually occurred in one of two ways: either the ma-
terial circumstances of tourism desublimated the aesthetic code of a
tourist’s consumption or the viewer’s efforts to encounter the new and
to defamiliarize the customary lapsed into a dependence on a familiar
(and shunned) visual paradigm, that of the picturesque.
The precariousness of the nineteenth-century tourist’s visual pleasure
is blatant in the prosaic accounts of ordinary persons in unfamiliar
settings; but it is noticeable as well in the records of practiced writers
on native ground. When Richard Jefferies, renowned in the second
part of the century for his contributions to a literature of English

ELH 74 (2007) 629–653 © 2007 by The Johns Hopkins University Press 629
husbandry and rural life, composed the three travel essays he later
collected for The Open Air (1885), he concentrated on the Victorian
tourist’s sedulous and frustrating efforts to isolate himself from other
excursionists and to elevate his observations into an almost abstract
formalism. Likewise, John Davidson, a journalist too, as well as a
poet—and one, moreover, on the fringes of avant-garde circles of
the nineties—remained uncomfortably aware of the obstacles to his
pursuit of aesthetic pleasure and legitimacy while on his walking-tours
of the Chiltern Hills and the environs of London. A collection of his
sketches entitled A Random Itinerary (1894) records the ambitious
traveler’s efforts to avoid the vapidity of sightseeing and elevate it into
an art of description allied with contemporary trends in aesthetic ap-
preciation and the production of the lyric. Written by men of known
cultural competence and easily linked to their own travels, these texts
exhibit the aspirations of many ordinary travelers who were eager to
elevate their tourism not simply into memorable moments but into
legitimate ones linked to elitist modes of production and consumption.
In recording their embarrassments, the following pages historicize the
conflict between the physiological apparatuses of enjoyment and the
contemporary aesthetics of authority and prestige.

i. richard jefferies, connoisseurship, and touristic shame

In his reverent study of the writing, and countryside, of Jefferies,

published 22 years after his death in 1909, Edward Thomas declared
his subject a romantic observer who “was clearly as much of the soil
as the things which he described.”4 More than a half-century later,
Raymond Williams read Jefferies’ nature and field studies, as well as
his commentaries on the condition of agriculture, as illustrations of
“green language,” a term he borrowed from John Clare’s “Pastoral
Poesy” (1832) to illuminate the social and political dilemma of late
eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century writers who had not prof-
ited from improvements in agriculture and tourism. The attention of
“green language” to the weather, lighting effects, birds, and botani-
cal life reflected the lonely imaginations of its users and registered,
as Williams has memorably written, “the separation of Nature from
the facts of the labour that is creating it” (“Nature” here being an
object of “conspicuous aesthetic consumption,” the nature recorded
in picturesque writing and drawing).5 These two compatible views of
Jefferies, as a romantic in whose late works “the sensuous was merged
and mingled with the spiritual” (in Thomas’s words) and as a purveyor

630 Aesthetic Embarrassment

of “his own natural perception and language” (in Williams’s), were
both set in opposition to the fashionable discourse of the picturesque.6
Both, however, obscure the fact that at times the writer’s observations
originated in the circumstances of domestic tourism. During solitary
walks in the English countryside or on conventional holidays in well-
known recreational areas, Jefferies frequently assumed the perspec-
tive not of a native but of a passerby, one bent on wresting pleasure
from details newly noticed or defamiliarized by transience and his
own felt estrangement. In the essays Jefferies wrote on Brighton and
the seaside in 1882 and collected in The Open Air, the language does
not reflect a “natural perception,” developed through long familiarity
with the landscape, but the accelerated and intensified consumption
of the visitor who moves through a space not normally accessible to
him. Scarcity (of time) compels him to consume as many sights as he
can and transform them efficiently into a pleasurable and respected
aesthetic experience.
The active holiday scene at Brighton would have been especially
poignant for Jefferies, who had retired there in 1882 to convalesce
from surgeries connected to the tuberculosis that would kill him five
years later. Whereas he had often written of English nature from
the perspective of a sportsman, in Brighton he was not only a visitor
but an invalid, and his descriptions reflect the observer’s stationary
hypervisualization. They abstract details into formalistic and painterly
elements that not only have obscured the crowded, ambient space of
the seaside but have sublimated—though barely—the tourist’s physical
and physiological pleasures. In “The Bathing Season,” the viewer fixes
his vision on the female form, studying the contrast between the “white
ankles of the blonde gleaming in the sunshine” and “the flesh tint of
the brunette beside her.”7 He surveys the effects of color and line when
three young girls in pink are carried by a wave and flung together on
the sand among other limp, female bodies left by the receding wave “in
every disconsolate attitude imaginable” (O, 136). He lingers over the
reclining body of a swarthy girl, whom he calls the Infanta Cleopatra,
“lying at full length at the edge of the foam . . . clad in some material
of a gauzy and yet opaque texture, permitting the full outline and the
least movement to be seen” (O, 143) as “[a]gain and again the foam
rushed up deep enough to cover her limbs . . . [w]ashed thus with the
purest whiteness of the sparkling foam” (O, 144). In these views, a
“natural . . . language” of description merges with a voguish impres-
sionism, and Jefferies emerges in the unlikely figure of the aesthete,
a decadent proponent of art for art’s sake.

Linda M. Austin 631

 The prurience of the observations here does not obscure their
pretentious aesthetic grounding. Indeed, abstracting the female body
into color, outline, light, and texture distinguishes the viewer’s eye
from that of the ordinary sightseer. The viewer’s formalistic language
interpolates a sophisticated and discerning eye, a connoisseur of
painterly elements whose pleasure originates in the erotic and Pate-
rian pulsations of viewing. The abstraction, visibly tied to the female
body, remains suggestive, nonetheless, and conjures a sensationalism
linked to picturesque sightseeing and vulgar tourism. For this reason,
the narrator of “The Bathing Season” must convey his neo-romantic
credentials in an additional way. He does so through an act of social
disavowal, devoting a few curmudgeonly paragraphs to the bothersome
conduct of nearby tourists. He calls them “joggers,” referring to their
habit of jostling his elbows or accosting him with small talk (O, 138).
The member of “inane humanity” who sits beside him, for instance,
interrupting his view of swimmers as they brave the waves from their
bathing machines, reminds him of another “hulking lout” who brushed
against him in “a great open space” at the Tower of London (O, 137)
and of others who have annoyed him in the British Museum, in pic-
ture galleries, in parks, even in country fields. Like all snobbish acts,
the tourist’s scorn of other tourists has an inadvertent and revealing
effect. It dispels the fiction of the disembodied eye created by the
essay’s formalistic language and turns “The Bathing Season” from a
purely impressionistic piece into a more general sociological study of
distinctive consumption.
Indeed, both “The Bathing Season” and “Sunny Brighton,” a com-
panion piece, are essays by and for tourists: they address their funda-
mental motives, aspirations, and anxieties. In them, Jefferies competes,
as did William Wordsworth in his Guide to the Lakes (1810–1835), for
the attention of the Eurocentric English traveler, calling Brighton (in
“Sunny Brighton”) a “Spanish town in England, a Seville” (O, 56) and
promoting its healthy and dry climate. Both essays employ a seden-
tary form of sightseeing that rests in visual stimulation. Jefferies’ own
convalescence demanded it; whereas the “earlier writings were the
work of a walker,” as Thomas observed, “the later are the work of one
who lies or sits.”8 In Brighton, the passing scene is to the recumbent
viewer a spectacle: watching idle fishermen and sun-flushed women
on horseback, he exclaims, “It is a stage, only it is real” (O, 61). This
emphasis on passive sensation reflects the physiological aesthetics,
which, as Regenia Gagnier has argued, pervaded writing of the fin
de siècle and treated the beautiful as that which stimulated the most

632 Aesthetic Embarrassment

pleasure with the least effort.9 But “The Bathing Season” in particular
is also fraught with the various tensions typical of the touristic experi-
ence: tensions between voyeurism and the sublimations of art, between
libidinous and ocular excitation, between the sensational scenes sought
by the common tourist and the exquisite sensations cultivated by the
aesthete, and, finally, between a “natural perception” of rural writing
and the formalistic description of the aesthete.
Understanding how and why a physiological aesthetic evaded sup-
pression amidst these conflicts requires a short detour into picturesque
theory. In his wide ranging survey first published in 1927, Christopher
Hussey noted the relationship between picturesque viewing based in
elements of painting and the literary and visual impressionism that
gained favor among the avant-garde in England after 1860. Both con-
centrated on color and pigmentation rather than on qualities inherent
in an object. The picturesque of Richard Payne Knight in particular
marks, according to Hussey, “the first step in the movement toward
abstract aesthetic values.”10 The relation between the picturesque
views of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century painters and
the formalist tendencies of later art was not terribly clear to an English
traveler in the second half of the nineteenth century, however. For
most of this period, in fact, the picturesque aesthetic, and the kind
of tourism it inevitably evoked, was anathema to any consumer who
aspired to distinguish herself as cultivated and socially responsible. Yet
in its early history the picturesque itself was driven by embarrassed
reactions to its practices. Among the pioneers of picturesque touring,
William Gilpin was probably the most famous, the most followed, and
the most burlesqued. His tours down the Wye in 1770 into Wales past
Tintern Abbey and in 1773 into north Wales to Caernarvon Castle and
the top of Snowdon did for the picturesque what Thomas Gray, in his
travels of 1765, had done for the sublime: they established an itinerary
and model of behavior for the traveler in search of a first-hand, but
painterly, experience of scenery in this nascent aesthetic category.11
Gilpinian tourists were, in Kim Ian Michasiw’s words, “sensationalist
nomads,” and descriptions in the Tours could be downright gothic.12
(“What is more beautiful . . . than an old tree with a hollow trunk?
Or with a dead arm, a drooping bough, or a dying branch?” Gilpin
poses in Remarks on Forest Scenery [1791].)13 To be sure, in his Tour
of the Lake District (1786), Gilpin himself reviled some of the area’s
engineered spectacles. (One involved taking a group of horses to the
middle of Lake Windermere in a flat-bottomed boat, then sinking it
and forcing the animals to swim to shore.) Although such “diversions of

Linda M. Austin 633

Newmarket,” as he called them, distracted visitors from the excitement
of natural scenery, they do suggest a fundamental similarity between
the kind of tour he had undertaken and encouraged—the experience
of the picturesque—and the ways in which the district had cultivated
unabashed mass tourist-behavior.14
If Gilpin had unleashed or at least abetted a monstrous industry,
Knight and Uvedale Price attempted to rescue the mode for a much
narrower and more exclusive socio-economic group. The efforts of
these second-generation writers to secure the picturesque to a rela-
tively elitist base of practitioners have been well recounted. But the
ways in which these attempts went awry and actually drove the mass
tourist industry have not been examined. Although both Price and
Knight had owners-improvers in mind when they wrote their treatises
on the picturesque, they also addressed travelers, and each tried to
restore the idea of connoisseurship to the tourist’s experience of the
picturesque. It was Price who, in his Essays on the Picturesque (1794),
enhanced the credentials of the mode and its seekers by carving a
separate aesthetic category for it, identifying “curiosity” as the chief
response and motive of the viewer.15 According to Judith Adler, by the
seventeenth century this word had sloughed its medieval association
with vice and begun to signify “virtuous passion for secular knowledge,
as well as scrupulous observation and concern for accuracy of detail.”16
Yet there was nothing necessarily intellectual about “curiosity” as Price
used it; the word, he writes in his Essays, chiefly indicated “a certain
irritation or stimulus” of the picturesque experience.17 This irritant
did not guarantee a course of intellectual and social improvement; nor
did it exclude the sensationalism that became linked with Gilpinian
touring in the 1780s and 1790s. So despite Price’s efforts elsewhere in
the essays to make the picturesque a cultivated visual mode of estate
improvement (as the subtitle of his Essays, “On the Use of Studying
Pictures, for the Purpose of Improving Real Landscape,” implies),
his theory validated the theatricality and spectacle with which the
picturesque had become linked.
Knight’s viewer, like Price’s, also belonged to a cultural nobility.
As conceived by Knight in his Analytical Inquiry into the Principles
of Taste (1805), the “picturesque” merely meant “after the manner of
painters,” and arose from associations that could “only be felt by per-
sons who have correspondent ideas to associate; that is, by persons in
a certain degree conversant with art.”18 These persons were consumers
of high culture, those who through long exposure to landscape paint-
ing had developed a spontaneous recognition and appreciation of the

634 Aesthetic Embarrassment

pictorial elements of natural scenery. Associating ideas, “whatever it
was in its beginning,” Knight comments, “has become so spontaneous
and rapid in adult persons, that it seems to be a mechanical operation
of the mind, which we cannot directly control.”19 Beholders became
so familiar with landscape art that the mnemonic operations through
which their associations occurred evaded consciousness. In this sense
Knight’s connoisseurs of the picturesque fall under the idea of a cultural
nobility as discussed by Pierre Bourdieu: as he observes, the dominant
conception of cultural appropriation privileges those who have had
early access to legitimate (high) culture over those whose cultural
experiences come mediated through education or formal training.20
Whereas the latter generally approach art through pedantic activities
like interpretation, the former respond to art with direct, immediate
enjoyment, as do Knight’s consumers. So by tracing picturesque view-
ing against the ascendant theory of associationism and relying, as did
other associationists, on the prevalent mechanical theories of neuro-
physiology to imagine an automatic mental activity, Knight reserved
the pleasures of picturesque for a sophisticated group of cognoscenti
who by long immersion in the world of art could derive a spontaneous
pleasure from viewing.
I shall relate shortly the particular ways in which the attempt to
rescue the associationist picturesque from the masses backfired. My
point for now is simply that the revolt against picturesque touring
began within the literature. The analysis of perception as an informed
process of (eventually) unconscious association and the refinement
of “curiosity” both assumed a select group of travelers repelled by
current trends in picturesque touring. In this context, the abstraction
of the painterly scene into a stationary formalism in Jefferies’ “The
Bathing Season” is a social reaction to, and a psychological outcome
of, picturesque viewing. The Brighton viewer does not connect sights
with those of a particular painter; still, he pursues the pictorial in
the arena of tourism. When he is successful, the natural and human
world turn into arrangements of line, shade, texture, and color. This
permutated form of picturesque, divorced from a specific subject or
a repertoire of painting, operates through a language of formalism, in
the process sublimating the sensations that might identify the viewer
as a vulgar tourist. Thus the Brighton tourist’s neat transformation of
prurient curiosity into connoisseurship of the higher senses, along with
his insulting descriptions of “joggers,” recapitulates the recoil from
tourism that occurred in the history of picturesque itself.
In Jefferies’ essays, ambitious tourists stake their moral superiority
on two rhetorical codes: the first, which I have just introduced, is a
Linda M. Austin 635
voguish painterly language of line and color severed from the conven-
tional object of mimesis (the whole female body) as well as from a
realistic context (a holiday scene). The second is the Kantian judgment
of beautiful form. Although intended to exhibit the taste of a travel-
ing connoisseur, this code too arises from, and never entirely sloughs,
its basis in picturesque sensation. One can see the operation of the
beautiful, as well as the influences of an emerging impressionism and
a residual picturesque, in “Golden-Brown,” another essay from The
Open Air. The object of attention is again women; this time, however,
they are casual laborers, rather than tourists at play in the sea, and
the title of the essay refers to the tanned skin of the two young fruit
pickers whom Jefferies’ walker encounters in the company of an older
worker during one of his solitary excursions around Kent.
The incident begins as a conventional, even an old-fashioned
picturesque moment, as the narrator describes the harmonies of the
scene as well as the ruggedness, neglect, and decay of the figures in
the landscape. The face of the oldest woman is a classic instance of
picturesque terrain in the Gilpinian mode, “torn and scarred by time
and weather; wrinkled, and in a manner twisted like the fantastic turns
of a gnarled tree-trunk, hollow and decayed. . . . Black shadows dwelt
in the hollows of the cheeks and temples, and there was a blackness
about the eyes” (O, 22). The two younger women yield a pleasing and
serene effect, in contrast; it was probably the description of them that
led Thomas, in his biography of Jefferies, to call the essay “a pure piece
of worship of the peculiar beauty of young labouring women” and an
instance of the “divine correspondencies” Jefferies customarily saw in
the female body.21 As in “The Bathing Season,” the observer reduces
and fragments their faces to technical relations of light and surface:
summer light had been “drunk up by the surface of the skin, and
emanated from it,” the writer recalls (O, 22). The “sunlight under [the]
faces [of the two younger women] made them beautiful,” he asserts
(O, 22). The power of the “sun’s rays reddens the cherry . . . gilds
the apple . . . [and] touches a woman’s face with the golden-brown
of ripe life. . . . There is no other hue so beautiful as this human
sunshine tint” (O, 23). The use of the word “beautiful” is crucial. The
narrator is not simply making observations; he is underwriting his
appreciation with a formal classification of pleasure and attempting
to establish his own credentials as a connoisseur. Like the informed
consumer of Knight’s era, he refers to painting to corroborate his
judgment, noting the same effects in the work of Rubens (“[P]erhaps
he saw [the sun’s hues] on the faces of the women who gathered fruit

636 Aesthetic Embarrassment

or laboured at the harvest in the Low Countries centuries since” [O,
23]). The old woman, a harbinger of nature’s destructive power and a
“fantastic” object, flanked by two young beauties who themselves will
become nature’s casualties, appear to him as iconic figures of three
aesthetic categories, the eldest combining qualities of the sublime and
the picturesque, while the younger women straddle the picturesque
and the beautiful.22
The traveler’s observations of this roadside triptych are self-con-
scious, doctrinaire, and pedantic. They derive from the sensational
descriptions of Gilpin and the painterly references of Knight, yet they
culminate in a magisterial and humane judgment of beauty, a Kantian
move that professes not just the speaker’s authority but his liberality.
For the judgment of the beautiful, based on subjective universal va-
lidity, endows the young women with a sociable quality; their beauty
can be apprehended readily by everyone. Moreover, by invoking the
consensus gentium through his judgment, the viewer mounts a chal-
lenge, for these women, who eventually will become revolting hags like
the ravaged and “picturesque” figure beside them, are by conventional
standards of feminine beauty unattractive, with their “plain features,”
black hands, and giant feet protruding from split shoes (O, 24). So not
only has the viewer, through his pronouncement, extended the quality
of the beautiful to laborers, he has also revealed his own moral capacity.
The judgment has a reflexive significance: it presents the viewer as a
humane and socially conscious connoisseur. Arguably, this demonstra-
tion of moral capacity is compromised by the formalistic language the
viewer uses to judge the women. Although the narrator’s pictorializing
joins a transcendental judgment to an emerging aestheticism, the
women seem to him more like impressionist pictures—arrangements
of color, texture, and light—than social bodies. Yet as Linda Dowling
has argued, the aesthetes shared a Whig social vision (advanced notably
by the Third Earl of Shaftesbury) that stressed “the equality of moral
capacity among all ranks.”23 Just as Kant’s subjective universal validity
(Critique of Judgment [1790]) assumed an intellectual rapport among
those who judged, so too did the aesthete’s “pulsations” (in Walter
Pater’s The Renaissance [1873]) hinge on animal kinship.24 This is a
physiological, rather than a cerebral, pleasure.
If Jefferies saw nothing crass in the tourist’s use of women for visual
pleasure, he was made aware of a social violation in the tourist’s gaze.
For immediately after the judgment of the beautiful in “Golden-
Brown,” the women brutally check the narrator’s act of social sympathy
and aesthetic appreciation:

Linda M. Austin 637

 As they passed they regarded me with bitter envy, jealousy, and hatred
written in their eyes. . . . Because they were going from one field of
labour to another field of labour, and I walked slowly and did no visible
work. . . . Why should I do nothing? They were as good as I was, and
they hated me. Their indignant glances spoke it as plain as words, and
far more distinctly than I can write it. You cannot read it with such
feeling as I received their looks. (O, 24–25)

Unlike Gilpin’s twisted and distorted trees, the fruit pickers can look
back, and through their glance, the visitor’s envy of their health be-
comes, the narrator effectively admits, a willful mystification of their
labor, his gaze a patronizing goad to their hostility. In returning a
pronouncement of “beauty” with a glance of “hatred,” the women
repudiate the traveler’s neutralizing formalism as well as his transcen-
dental judgment; they assert a socioeconomic divide in their ephemeral
relations with an ailing and preoccupied passerby who, in envy of their
“being always in the sunlight, the air, and abroad” (O, 26), sees them
as “immortals of the earth” (O, 24). Both aesthetic codes are not so
much contradicted, then, as embarrassed, shamed, and nullified. To
the casual laborers, the aesthetic judgment of the gaping walker is
irrelevant; he is just a kind of tourist, and his look an instance of the
intrusive and offensive snapshot.
In “Golden-Brown,” the viewer assumes agreement—the subjective
universal validity of the Kantian moment—through a statement of judg-
ment. In doing so, he has aestheticized the ravaged laboring body, just
as he has the erotic body in “The Bathing Season,” for his own moral
aggrandizement. In both essays he seems partly aware of doing so. His
efforts simultaneously exemplify John Urry’s two oppositional catego-
ries of the “tourist gaze”: on the one hand the romantic, associated
with solitary appreciation of scenery, and, on the other, the Gilpinian,
collective mode of pleasure. Like the boat-sinking Gilpin witnessed,
the latter may seem, to the elitist tourist, artificial and vulgar; but as
Frow has argued, the categories are not always separate.25 And as the
essays by Jefferies suggest, the distinctions between the two groups,
so consciously felt and desired by the narrator, are not apparent either
to Gilpinian tourists, represented by the joggers, or to the natives,
represented by the female casuals. For all his cultural superiority and
connoisseurship, Jefferies’ humane observer finds himself mistaken
for a tourist by both representatives. His dilemma suggests just how
vulnerable his struggle for pleasure and legitimacy is within the arena
of tourism. Unable to hold a material or mental space apart from the
masses, the connoisseur must move quickly: for the site of aesthetic

638 Aesthetic Embarrassment

production is also the ground of all the threats to enjoyment, an arena
of potential pleasure and imminent humiliation.26

ii. john davidson, walking, and touristic shame

In this essay I have used tourism broadly, to cover a conventional

seaside holiday as well as a recreational walk in an unfamiliar place.
Both suggest that the purpose of the tour for the ambitious and artisti-
cally inclined consumer is to exercise and display aesthetic judgment
and refined perception. Before recounting his embarrassment, the
narrator of “Golden-Brown” evokes a significant condition for achieving
this purpose when he calls attention to his solitary and contemplative
movement. He travels in a distinguished path of romantic pedestrians,
whose writings on nature offered an alternative to picturesque sightsee-
ing, and his successors included not only Thomas but Leslie Stephen,
who formed the Sunday Tramps, a group that met for semi-monthly
excursions from about 1880 to 1895. Anne Wallace has discussed the
ways in which early romantic walking inspired a “peripatetic” literary
mode, which functioned as a “mimetic alternative to the increas-
ingly unsatisfactory perception and representation of natural scenes
as discrete ‘views.’”27 But Stephen, conversely, attributed the rise of
romanticism to a revived interest in recreational walking. Walking is
“primitive and simple . . . it brings us into contact with mother earth
and unsophisticated nature; it requires no elaborate apparatus and no
extraneous excitement,” he writes in “In Praise of Walking” (1901). The
walker, unlike the tourist, is someone who is “able to enjoy his own
society without the factitious stimulants of the more violent physical
recreations.”28 Here, Stephen makes the opposition between tourism
and travel explicit.
Yet the distinction was, as he himself suspects, fanciful. In his es-
say, Stephen weighs the critical heritage of earlier nineteenth-century
poet-walkers against his own experience. The distractions and preoc-
cupations of the recreation do not figure in the literature of Thomas
Carlyle, Thomas De Quincey, Samuel Coleridge, and the revered
Wordsworth, he comments. “Even when they speak of the beauties of
nature, they would give us to understand that they might have been
disembodied spirits . . . independent of the physical machinery of legs
and stomachs” (P, 106). The exertion of walking has stunted his own
descriptive powers, which he conceives of in traditional terms of picto-
rial association (“I do not . . . know how to make a judicious allusion
to Botticelli or Tintoretto” [P, 107]). He professes not “the smallest

Linda M. Austin 639

remorse” for his own preoccupation with amenities as well as with
the essential pleasures of “eating and drinking.” Still, he confesses to
feeling “an uncomfortable diffidence” (P, 107) before the sentences
from John Ruskin’s Modern Painters, which mouth to him a collective
reproach: “You, they seem to say, are, after all, a poor prosaic crea-
ture, affecting a love of sublime scenery as a cloak for more grovelling
motives” (P, 107). Walking may be fit for “poets and philosophers”
(P, 98), Stephen muses; but only if they omit the infrastructure of
tourism that it entails.
“In Praise of Walking” incarnates the aesthetically-centered idea of
foot-travel: it includes the viewer’s physical maneuvering, interruptions,
animal comforts, and indulgences—all the activities and pleasures of the
lower senses. Foregrounding the prosaic processes behind and around
the view—the crowded arena of hosts and other walkers—the essay
stresses the tensions that have always existed between travel as both
tourism and an exercise in distinctive consumption. These tensions are
evident in travel journals written before Stephen’s time. Ann Radcliffe,
who in 1794 wrote in the thick of the passion for the picturesque and
the sublime, intersperses her conventionally phrased, melancholic
reactions to the Lake District’s famous scenery with nagging anxieties
about tipping residents for giving directions and opening gates. In her
Guide to Windermere (1854), Harriet Martineau alternated between
the presentation of picturesque views and descriptions of comfortable
inns, along with other accoutrements of the host culture.29 Historically,
the inspiration for early nineteenth-century walkers came from Thomas
West’s (1778) and Wordsworth’s (1810 to 1835) guides to the Lake
District—the same two books that had launched the largely middle-
class vogue of the picturesque holiday in the Lakes. By the tenth edi-
tion of West’s Guide, with the journal of Gray’s tour of 1769 folded
in it, “the way of looking at the landscape had become formalized,”
according to Esther Moir, “and the picturesque vocabulary hardened
into convention.”30 Stephen’s essay not only acknowledged what had
been an unstated conflict between the sensory orientation of tourism
and the contemplative or abstract realm of travel but pursued the
effect of this conflict on the tourist. The text portrays the experience
generically, as a series of shifts between material interests and moments
of refined and exalted visual pleasure. The walking-tour is presented
as part of a range of touristic activities as a result. Still, it appeals to
discontents, those for whom the romantic ideology of travel effects
what Frow has called a “fantasized dissociation” from the practices of
popular touring.31

640 Aesthetic Embarrassment

 But Stephen’s essay merely broaches the subject; Davidson’s A
Random Itinerary, written several years before Stephen’s essay, dra-
matizes the estrangement and, in addition to exposing the mechanics
of traveling, closes the gap between the connoisseurial perception of
the elitist traveler and the conventional pleasures of the ordinary tour-
ist. Published in 1894, the volume catered to the tastes of the market
for short travel pieces, in the manner of Jefferies’ The Open Air, and
it recorded observations Davidson was simultaneously working into
the poems he was writing during his flirtation with aestheticism. Part
aesthete’s notebook, part recreational walker’s journal, the Itinerary
covers the usual external embarrassments of tourism—crowds, hostile
natives, tedious waits. The volume also finds a subtler impediment
to pleasure in the incompatibility of the sightseer’s aesthetic code
with the material and social practices of tourism. In these moments
of disharmony, A Random Itinerary becomes a comic representation
of aesthete as ordinary tourist; his mishaps explain why a demotic
version of the picturesque derived from the sensationalism of Gilpin
and Price, along with the cultivated and automatic associationism of
Knight, remained a default aesthetic for all travelers.
The tension between traveler and tourist throughout the volume
is fundamental, inherent in the ambiguity of the word “itinerant.”
Does the word connote walking in the honored romantic sense; or
does it suggest the contemporary practice of rambling? The latter was
largely an urban, working-class form of recreation, with a history of
challenging landowners for rights of way. The walking-club to which
Stephen belonged, the Sunday Tramps, typified the former. It was
generally a retrospective bunch, according to Harvey Taylor, hostile
toward railroads and industrial capitalism, and given to philosophizing,
aesthetic appreciation, and intellectual pursuits.32 Davidson’s narrator
(like Davidson himself) belongs to the humble classes; indeed, he is a
late Victorian beneficiary of a long battle, begun in the previous gen-
eration, for public access to the unspoiled countryside. The itinerant
separates himself from ramblers, however, by stressing his isolation
and by recording his meditations (which often have nothing to do with
the scenes through which he walks). He also explicitly denies affiliation
with rambling in a dialogue with an imaginary disputant, who functions
as both a skeptical conscience and a skeptical reader. To the charge
that he has not “loitered enough,” that his notes on leaves, birds, and
trees are not detailed enough, that he lacks “the true spirit of the
rambler,” the itinerant responds, “I am not a naturalist” and mounts
a familiar romantic defense, claiming that the book reflects his own

Linda M. Austin 641

spirit and mood.33 His refusal to accept an external definition of the
“spirit” or motive of rambling avoids links with radical politics and the
packaged recreations of church, walking, and temperance groups that
were becoming ever more popular among the working-classes in the
last two decades of the nineteenth century.34 In fact, throughout the
book, the itinerant makes his dislike of rambling tourists and tourism
of any sort clear. This revulsion largely dictates the solitary way he
chooses to travel, the byways he seeks, and the objects he chooses to
see. Visiting Hampton Court Park (“an affectation” [R, 68]), he con-
centrates on the noise from crowds of “[b]abbling, chattering, laughing,
men, women, and children . . . commenting on each other” (R, 73).
Having arrived at his spot in Epping Forest by train, the itinerant is
indignant when referred (by another itinerant, this one a sightseer)
to a verderer’s book; Davidson’s itinerant never buys guidebooks, he
declares. He is committed to avoiding shortcuts or the highway, and
he ignores famous travel stops (“He never saw the Roman remains;
he must have passed by them or even through them” [R, 23]), instead
deliberately searching for a famous “cress-ditch” (R, 49). The visual
paradigm guiding his view is anti-picturesque, as it was for first-gen-
eration romantics.
A Random Itinerary contains the raw material for the fashionable
painterly language Davidson was using as a fin-de-siècle impressionist
and poet of the decadence. At times the phrasing of the lyrics David-
son composed based on his walks is almost a verbatim transcription
from the travel journal. The itinerant’s account of a journey from the
Isle of Dogs to Sydenham, for instance, became Davidson’s Turner-
esque lyric of Scottish patriotism, “In the Isle of Dogs” (1898). In this
poem, the organ-melody described as “A noble tune, a high becoming
mate / Of the capped mountains and the deep broad firth, / A simple
tune and great” is similarly characterized in the Itinerary as “[g]reat,
simple music, a fit mate for the mountains of Argyleshire and the
broad firth” (R, 109–10).35 The attention in the Itinerary, moreover,
to the weather, clouds, light, birds, and trees possesses the features of
abstract formalism. Sky, fields, and cultivated land are brought together
in color schemes (“the young green of the corn gave the chalky soil a
mauve color” [R, 161]), and natural elements are synthesized (trees
“pressing close burst aloft into a fountain that showers in emerald
spray” [R, 172]).
The descriptions are those of a neo-romantic traveler, yet his impres-
sions are affectless. They contain no signs of nervous excitement or
successive “pulsations”; they lack the neurosensory charge that Pater’s
famous conclusion to The Renaissance describes or the curiosity that
642 Aesthetic Embarrassment
Joris-Karl Huysmans’s sometimes bizarre experiments display. Indeed,
many of the experiences the itinerant recounts are abortive attempts
to imitate a prestigious or fashionable aesthetic process. He counts
caterpillars on leaves in Epping Forest and stares at the lattice-work on
the Spanish chestnuts in Greenwich Park; but as he is “no naturalist,”
he moves on. He tries again, and comments on the oddly mechani-
cal repetition of the cuckoo’s call (“The bird called nine times and a
half. At the fifth it said only ‘cuck,’ and stopped . . . a rest stood for
the ‘coo,’ and it kept time with the sixth call complete” [R, 36]). The
cress-ditch he perversely seeks is so small he misses it as he passes.
He is unable to deploy either the codes of literary impressionism or
naturalism; and he cannot, therefore, wield a Kantian rhetoric of judg-
ment. So although the bland recounting of the itinerant resembles
the “‘pure’ gaze” that paralleled scientific observation and became the
fundament of aesthetic pleasure in literary and painterly impression-
isms, the itinerant himself remains disengaged and frequently appears
disoriented and foolish.36
Likewise walking, which assumes a kind of legendary and mythical
cast in the poems Davidson wrote based on his travels as the itiner-
ant, forms part of the exposed and monotonous modus operandi of
transportation in the Itinerary. Asking directions, losing his way, and
waiting for trains constitute the main incidents of the book, and the
banality of touring undermines the itinerant’s artistic eye for shape,
color, and sound. Often, as he moves through various spaces, either
registering sights, stopping for brief exchanges with locals, or engag-
ing in argument with his phantom disputant, he turns his attention
from the outside world altogether. This happens especially as he
waits for public transportation. In these periods, his daydreams and
reflections, although replete with literary associations (to Robert
Burns and Samuel Johnson), have no link with external stimuli. In
general, no fruitful conduit between the external and the internal
exists in A Random Itinerary. Perceptions do not prompt meditation,
associations, or memories; nor do they result in traditional aesthetic
judgments. Without a basis in romantic foot-travel, the itinerant’s
descriptions lack reflective potential and traditional aesthetic gravity.
Tentative in his attempts at impressionistic viewing, feckless in the ex-
ercise of aesthetic judgment, but firm in his dissociation from popular
working-class rambling and alignment with solitary, romantic travel,
the itinerant is guided chiefly by a “fantasized dissociation” from all
things touristic. There is nothing intuitive or spontaneous about his
behavior. Like Jefferies, he maneuvers self-consciously, mediating his

Linda M. Austin 643

responses through a series of implicit social denials and alignments,
disdaining sightseeing, seeking the obscure, and emulating the solitary
and autonomous walker.
Of course the itinerant is the butt of the Itinerary. He represents the
unexceptional tourist, someone without what Bourdieu calls “habitus,”
the acquired dispositions (of the body in geographical and social space)
that enable one to perceive and judge.37 Because the itinerant does
not have a long familiarity with the natural or built world in which
he travels, he lacks the capacity for intuitive enjoyment that comes
from immersion. And A Random Itinerary has an additional target.
The volume was published by John Lane on the recommendation of
Richard Le Gallienne, a member of the Rhymers Club, and Davidson
was one of its members as well. Thus, he possessed a certain cultural
capital—the techniques of impressionism and naturalism variously
employed by those in the Club and others in the artistic vanguard of
the eighties and nineties—notwithstanding the failures of his itinerant.
In A Random Itinerary these techniques yield no sensory enjoyment
not just because the itinerant is a less able traveler than his creator
but because they represent an over-intellectualized aesthetic, which
the circumstances of modern urban rambling render particularly inap-
propriate. Within the broader context of Davidson’s career, then, the
travelogue satirizes the counterintuitive qualities of literary impression-
ism. Touristic embarrassment thus reflects the failure of the aesthetic
code to withstand the material circumstances of tourism and to explain
the physiological pleasures of the familiar.
As a satirical document evincing the shame of tourism, the Itiner-
ary also records the ambitious tourist’s reversion to old-fashioned
picturesque scenes: these offer him rare moments of confidence and
relief. Reaching Chesham, for example, he notes with uncharacteristic
decision the “aesthetic value” of the narrow streets and the old and ir-
regular houses (R, 52). Entering the rural culture of the Chiltern Hills
in the book’s last section, he becomes nostalgic as he meets friendly
alewives and crusty farmers. The thatched houses in Whiteleaf are,
he declares, “a place to live in: [an] exquisite . . . place to die in” (R,
173). That the independent and headstrong itinerant, who denies
any associations with the rambling movement, who fruitlessly adopts
the scientific eye of the naturalist and the pure gaze of the aesthete,
and turns each into a state of sensory numbness, should succumb to
the hackneyed charms of a thatched cottage and dream of living in
one is hardly unique. By the late nineteenth century, the picturesque
had shifted from Gilpin’s vacant landscapes—dotted only with cows

644 Aesthetic Embarrassment

or cast-off farm implements—to continental scenes of peasants and
villages. These had been the favorite subjects of a previous generation
of painters, including Samuel Prout and William Clarkson Stanfield,
and they were traceable to Price’s own pictures of the built landscape.
In 1795 Radcliffe had applied “picturesque” to castles and ruins; a
century later Davidson used it to describe the humbler structures on
the tortuous streets of Chesham. Both employed the term in Price’s
sense, to evoke irregularity, age, and attractive dereliction.38 The appeal
to the itinerant of winding streets and irregular buildings indicated
the formative influence of this kind of work and its enduring control
over middle-brow Victorian taste.
The itinerant’s reversion to a generalized version of the picturesque
was the psychological legacy of Knight’s associationism; it had provided
a template for the internal experience of the refined traveler and had
involved conscious referrals to a particular group of painters—the
purveyors of the sublime, or the Claudian beautiful. In Knight’s
imagination, these associations would become less deliberate, even
automatic after some repetition. Together, they would form one of the
dispositions of the cultivated viewer’s “habitus.” References to Gaspar
[Dughet] Poussin, Stanfield, Salvatore Rosa, or Ossian (the last two
Radcliffe’s favored references), which instantly packaged views for
the beholder, over time would fade into allusions, and “picturesque”
would become the key entry in the tourist’s vocabulary of visual lit-
eracy. Knight imagined this process of familiarization and psychologi-
cal abbreviation occurring in an individual viewer, but it also applied
to the use of the picturesque historically. By the second half of the
century, the word “picturesque” had lost its ties to a particular group
of landscape painters and come to cover pictorial scenery in the other
two aesthetic categories as well. It could evoke, that is, the sublime of
Richard Wilson, the beautiful of Claude Lorraine, or the village scenes
of painters like Stanfield and Prout.39
The easy satisfaction of the picturesque in the section of the Itiner-
ary on the Chiltern Hills compensates for the affectless perceptions of
the itinerant’s potentially avant-garde approach to the natural world
elsewhere. Indeed, the itinerant’s reversion to the pleasures of the
picturesque reflects the success with which such images of preserved
buildings and isolated regional cultures had saturated tourists’ percep-
tions and desires by the close of the century. These images fed a collec-
tive nostalgia that, as Elizabeth Helsinger has shown, had aggregated
around the rural scene during the first half of the nineteenth century
and often had disguised its particular social and political troubles.40

Linda M. Austin 645

A Random Itinerary reveals this retrograde investment of the tourist
in mythologized rural cultures, his preference—despite his preten-
sions—for national kitsch.
In a retrospective on landscape painting for The Nineteenth Century
in 1880, Alfred William Hunt noted the contempt of artists toward the
picturesque.41 This attitude, a result of various drives toward realism
in art, has its parallel in the critical attacks of the 1980s and 1990s
on the picturesque and the social practices dedicated to its particular
pleasures. These charges against the picturesque—for perpetuating
enclosures, the colonialist gaze, and abusive systems of outdoor relief
in England—have eased recently and given way to a consideration of
the “indeterminate character” of the mode in its various uses, along
with an appreciation of its service “as propaedeutic in visual literacy”
to tourists.42 Although studies in this vein cannot and do not deny
the tourist’s implication in schemes of regulation and control, they
generally develop from the tacit assumption that individual tourists
are powerless and sense their lack of power. Through the lens of this
new tolerance, focused on the experiences of the individual rather than
the mass, one glimpses the poignancy of the tourist’s position (then, as
well as now): without, or feeling himself without, a set of dispositions;
faced with the task of pleasure; obliged to reassert or even define social
position quickly; determined to see the area’s sights in a proper and
enjoyable way. These were not always harmonious or congenial tasks,
and undertaking them together often set the individual tourist at odds
with the general enterprise of tourism.
Hence the picturesque performed an especially valuable service
for ordinary tourists. Uttering the word itself endowed their taste
with a subjective universal validity and indicated their absorption
of some vague canon of art. As Malcolm Andrews has observed, the
pronouncement “picturesque” eventually performed a “descriptive
shortcut.”43 As both word and category, it signaled the paucity of the
average tourist’s descriptive language even as it aped the spontane-
ous consumption of a cultural nobility. Uttering “picturesque,” the
tourist affirmed the pictorial quality of the scene and moved on to
the next encounter. Instances of this double function are ubiquitous.
The journal of Elizabeth Foster Brown is just one Victorian example.
She and her daughter accompanied their cousin, the Victorian wood-
engraver and watercolorist Birket Foster, his wife, and the painters
W. J. Orchardson and Frederick Walker to Venice in 1868. Brown’s
journal appears in H. M. Cundall’s biography, Birket Foster (1906),
presumably to help Cundall chart the illustrator’s continental holiday.

646 Aesthetic Embarrassment

The excerpts reprinted contain no extended description or artful de-
tail. Instead Brown applies the word “picturesque” promiscuously: to
fishing boats along the Adriatic (evoking, perhaps, the marine scenes
of Stanfield), to the garments worn by the women of nearby Chiog-
gia, and to marketplaces. The word indicates a conformity of objects
and scenes to unspecified pictures. “Picturesque” assumes here the
postmodern function of self-reference, evident in much twentieth-
century tourist literature. As MacCannell observes, twentieth-cen-
tury guidebooks tend to present objects “as if they [were] pictures,
maps, or panoramas of themselves.”44 They please because they look
like familiar representations, the sources of which have faded from
memory, if they ever were consciously remembered. The village “is a
very picturesque place,” Brown writes in her journal, “but so queer
and dirty that I was glad to return to the steamboat.”45 The villagers
have fulfilled Brown’s expectations (even though they are “dirty” and
“queer,” the equivalents of decay and irregularity, perennial faults of
“picturesque”) because, to repeat MacCannell’s phrase, they are objects
that look like pictures of themselves.46
Knight’s and Price’s theories had the potential to relieve the tourist’s
awkwardness by providing a retreat into an institutional culture of
painting or history. Much later, however, the use of “picturesque”
in the journal of Brown reveals similar effects, but for a different
population. Here, the word obviates the need of conscious knowl-
edge, perceptive ingenuity, or verbal ability—capabilities assumed in
Knight’s description—while still performing the satisfying closure of
a particular instant of sightseeing. Playing a phatic role in the tourist’s
experience, it denoted a tacit but vague formula of the familiar and
guided the search for the view-worthy object while dispensing with the
need for description. In Price’s terms, the word registered a habitual
absorption of sights that constituted the spectator’s “curiosity”; and in
Knight’s, it marked, as it would for Brown, a repeated, non-cerebral
act of consumption based in nebulous association. When Davidson
wrote, the word still credentialed objects as quintessential features of
a national or regional culture for the tourist.
As a category evoked through habit, the picturesque thus depended
for its preservation on the tourist’s distance and haste. Davidson’s itiner-
ant asks an innkeeper why he has spoiled the original appearance of an
old, low ceilinged, cross-beamed room with a modern grate. A farmer
he meets among the Chilterns, walking as if in costume with his stick
and basket of eggs, declares himself against Home Rule and adds, “I
wish Gladstone was dead. . . . He hyptonises people, and makes them

Linda M. Austin 647

think as he thinks, everywhere” (R, 155). The itinerant sees a Chiltern
shepherd lying under a hawthorn but fears approaching him, “lest I
should find him,” he writes, “with a copy of the Commonweal in his
pocket” (R, 168). The vague resentments of the rural individualist
especially alarm the itinerant, who fears discovering a shepherd with
socialist, even anarchic leanings. The decision of the itinerant not to
spoil the picturesque effect of the shepherd underscores his dissocia-
tion from the radical agenda of the rambling movement and thwarts
his romantic sympathies. The villagers’ disaffection from the social
and political bonds of nation, coupled with their lack of interest in
the aesthetic trappings of English heritage, presents, for the itiner-
ant, a confusing combination. The picturesque is embedded in the
sections on the itinerant’s rural treks through the Chilterns, then, but
its aesthetic power is fragile and dependent on the tourist’s transience
in the cultural arena.
Periodically, A Random Itinerary approaches the phatic condition of
a journal like Brown’s because it is, at bottom, a document of tourism,
a repository of material elided from representations of the pure and
disembodied gaze that became the dominant perception behind late
nineteenth-century forms of high art. In this connection, the endurance
of the picturesque as a category of pleasure, as well as the prosaic func-
tion of the utterance “picturesque,” while it does not directly expose
the apparatus or material context of viewing, resurrects an aesthetic
linked with these contexts and centered on the despised tourist. When
Brown pronounces the costumes of the village women “picturesque,”
she confirms a sourceless preconception about the peasants as spectacle
for her eyes. Similarly, when the itinerant keeps his distance from the
indolent shepherd or objects to modern features of a Tudor interior,
he reveals his dependence on stock figures, what Raphael Samuel has
called “subliminal points of reference.”47 Unlike Brown, the itinerant
is partly aware of his reliance on them, and A Random Itinerary, as
well as the essays by Jefferies, reads as a modern commentary on the
dilemma of tourists who try, unsuccessfully, to adopt fashionable and
elite modes of viewing in order to elevate their perceptions into a
proto-modernist form of art and to distinguish their pleasures from
those pursued by hosts of others.
The associative technique of the picturesque, the assimilation of
the strange instantly into the vaguely familiar, reminds the reader just
how uncomfortable and disarming travel could be. (“I really did feel
a foreigner, and was never so much stared at in my life. The people
stood in crowds to look at us,” Brown writes of her excursion to

648 Aesthetic Embarrassment

Chioggia.)48 In Jefferies’ texts, traditional and fin de siècle aesthetics
were intended as humane gestures by the subject toward his objects,
but these were either rebuffed (in “Golden-Brown”) or interrupted
(in “The Bathing Season”). In Davidson’s later text, these efforts are
consistently jarred by the perceiver’s movement or undermined by the
subject’s comical discomfort with the pure gaze. Jefferies and Davidson
subject the current modes of perception to the test of representation
in a dynamic world. In doing so, they hint at the effeteness of these
perceptual paradigms and anticipate the modernist idea of aesthete as
artificer rather than human being. The laborious and failed attempts
of Brown and her more capable contemporaries to derive prestigious
and humane pleasure from sightseeing realize the great fear of all
travelers—that they are, at bottom, only tourists who, despite ambi-
tious attempts to cultivate connoisseurship and display their prolonged
and deep familiarity with art, eventually will need the husk of an old
and discredited aesthetic to register pleasure and guide them through
the surprisingly treacherous straits of social movement and distinctive
consumption.
Oklahoma State University
notes
1
Jonathan Culler, “Semiotics of Tourism,” American Journal of Semiotics 1 (1981):
127.
2
See Daniel J. Boorstin, The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (New
York: Harper & Rowe, 1961). Likewise, John Urry writes of the “universalisation of
the tourist gaze” (The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies
[London: Sage, 1990], 134), and others have discussed the difficulty of getting beyond
“pseudo-events” to some sort of authentic experience: Urry acknowledges the influence
of Culler, who defines the tourist and tourism as an “exemplary case” of the object
as sign (127). Most recently, Julian Barnes’s comedy of the near future, England,
England (New York: Knopf, 1999), in which the Isle of Wight has become a replica-
filled amusement park, the brain-child of an entrepreneur engaged in various sorts of
infantilism, continues the satire on the simulations perpetrated by the tourist industry.
Many of the attacks on tourism are driven by the delusion that the inauthenticity of
the industry is relatively recent. Robert Hewison (The Heritage Industry [London:
Methuen, 1987]), for example, charges that the so-called industry is not industrial
in the old-fashioned and literal sense of production. David Lowenthal (The Past is
a Foreign Country [Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1985], xvii–xviii) focuses on
the perpetration of a false past through preservation and tourism. Voicing the most
frequent general opinion, Sven Birkerts attributes contemporary distance from the past
to the textual saturation of reality in the Information Age (“American Nostalgias,” The
Writer’s Chronicle 31.4 [1999]: 27–37).
3
John Frow, “Tourism and the Semiotics of Nostalgia,” October 57 (1991): 147; Dean
MacCannell, The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken,
1976), 9. For a full discussion of Frow’s term, see 146–49.

Linda M. Austin 649

 4
Edward Thomas, Richard Jefferies: His Life and Work (London: Hutchinson, 1909),
320. Thomas compares Jefferies’ essays to Victorian favorites by William Wordsworth,
even though, as W. J. Keith has noted, the name of the poet does not once appear
in Jefferies’ work. See Keith, The Rural Tradition: A Study of the Non-Fiction Prose
Writers of the English Countryside (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1974), 139–40.
5
Raymond Williams, The Country and the City (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973),
141, 128. Later, Williams dwells on the ambivalence of Jefferies’ position regarding
rural capitalism until the last writings, which align the Victorian’s sympathies with
rural labor and the work of William Cobbett, Joseph Arch, and Thomas Hardy (see
Williams, 193–95).
6
Thomas, 328; Williams, 132.
7
Richard Jefferies, “The Bathing Season,” in The Open Air (1885; repr., Philadel-
phia: George W. Jacobs, n.d.), 135. All quotations from “The Bathing Season,” “Sunny
Brighton,” and “Golden-Brown” come from The Open Air, hereafter abbreviated O
and cited parenthetically by page number.
8
Thomas, 223.
9
See Regenia Gagnier, The Insatiability of Human Wants: Economics and Aesthetics
in Market Society (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 2000), 136.
10
Christopher Hussey, The Picturesque: Studies in a Point of View (1927; repr.,
London: Frank Cass, 1967), 17.
11
See William Gilpin, Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South
Wales, etc., relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year
1770 (London: Blamire, 1782). The tour through North Wales in 1773 was published
with his “Eastern tour” as Observations on Several Parts of the Counties of Cambridge,
Norfolk, Suffolk, and Essex. Also on Several Parts of North Wales, relative chiefly to
Picturesque Beauty, in two tours, the former made in . . . 1769, the latter in . . . 1773
(London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1809).
12
Kim Ian Michasiw, “Nine Revisionist Theses on the Picturesque,” Representations
38 (1992): 82.
13
Gilpin, Remarks on Forest Scenery, and Other Woodland Views, (Relative Chiefly
to Picturesque Beauty) Illustrated by the Scenes of New-Forest in Hampshire, 2 vols.
(London: Blamire, 1791), 1:8.
14
Gilpin, Observations Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the Year
1772, on Several Parts of England; particularly the Mountains, and Lakes of Cum-
berland, and Westmorland, 2 vols. (London: Blamire, 1786), 2:68. For this entire
episode, see 68–69.
15
Uvedale Price, Essays on the Picturesque, As compared with the Sublime and the
Beautiful; and, on The Use of Studying Pictures for the Purpose of Improving Real
Landscape, 2 vols. (London: J. Mawman, 1810), 1:88.
16
Judith Adler, “Origins of Sightseeing,” Annals of Tourism Research 16 (1989):
15.
17
Uvedale Price, 1:125.
18
Richard Payne Knight, An Analytical Inquiry into the Principles of Taste, 4th ed.
(London: T. Payne, 1808), 148, 152.
19
Knight, 136.
20
See Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans.
Richard Nice (London: Routledge, 1984), 2.
21
Thomas, 225, 227. An infatuation with women as mystical forces of nature is not
uncommon in Jefferies’ work, though it is not often mentioned. It reaches its dizzi-

650 Aesthetic Embarrassment

est apex in his creation of “Felise” in The Dewy Morn (1884). Thomas compares the
treatment of Felise with that of the women in “Golden-Brown”—sympathetically, as
we might expect for the time. See Thomas, 224–28.
22
As Martin Price has observed, in eighteenth-century aesthetics frequently the pic-
turesque was an unstable third category, veering at times toward the sublime, at times
toward the beautiful (“The Picturesque Moment,” in From Sensibility to Romanticism:
Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, ed. Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom
[New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1965], 259–92, esp. 262).
23
Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: the Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy
(Charlottesville: Univ. Press of Virginia, 1996), 12.
24
Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: Univ. of California
Press, 1981), 190.
25
Urry, 86. Frow notes the vulnerability of the elitist traveler’s ethos to competi-
tion for touristic territory, both in images circulated by the industry and in material
spaces. See Frow, 147.
26
In this regard, Gilpin’s project assumes, Michasiw has argued, the powerlessness
of tourists and their inability to affect the landscape (94). He comes to this conclusion
after having argued that Gilpin’s picturesque actually constituted an “anti-aesthetic”
opposed to the idea of the romantic subject and “the associative model of the mind”
(87; my emphasis), thereby violating the development of the Kantian subject.
27
Anne D. Wallace, Walking, Literature, and English Culture: The Origins and Uses
of Peripatetic in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1993), 13.
28
Leslie Stephen, “In Praise of Walking,” Monthly Review 4 (August 1901): 98.
Hereafter abbreviated P and cited parenthetically by page number.
29
One boy Radcliffe encounters between Shap and Borrowdale blushes when she
offers him some halfpence for opening a gate, prompting her “to suppose at first, that
enough had not been given; but we were soon informed, that nothing was expected”
(Ann Radcliffe, Journey Made in the Summer of 1794, through Holland and the West-
ern Frontier of Germany, . . . to which are added Observations during a Tour to the
Lakes of Lancashire, Westmoreland, and Cumberland [London: G. G. and J. Robinson,
1795], 397–98). For more mechanics of touring, see also Harriet Martineau’s Guide to
Windermere, with Tours to the Neighboring Lakes and Other Interesting Places, 2nd
ed. (London: S. Garnett, 1854), 5.
30
Esther Moir, The Discovery of Britain: The English Tourists (London: Routledge
and Kegan Paul, 1964), 141. The second edition of Thomas West’s A Guide to the
Lakes in Cumberland, Westmorland, and Lancashire (London: Richardson and others,
1780) began printing Gray’s journal as an appendix. West’s Guide had gone through
nine editions by 1807; and Wordsworth’s text, which originally accompanied Rev.
Joseph Wilkinson’s Select Views (London: R. Ackermann, 1810), referred to it in turn
as a model. Wordsworth’s Guide appeared separately in 1822, as A Description of the
Scenery of the Lakes in the North of England, etc. The definitive (10th) edition is A
Guide through the District of the Lakes, in the North of England, with a Descrip-
tion of the Scenery, etc., for the use of Tourists and Residents (London: Hudson and
Nicholson, 1835).
31
Frow, 146.
32
See Harvey Taylor, A Claim on the Countryside: A History of the British Outdoor
Movement (Edinburgh: Keele Univ. Press, 1997), 62–64. For an alternate historiogra-
phy emphasizing the leftist leanings of the rambling movement and the decades-long
struggle of working-class participants for rights-of-way over private property, see Tom

Linda M. Austin 651

Stephenson, Forbidden Land: The Struggle for Access to Mountain and Moorland
(Manchester: Manchester Univ. Press, 1989).
33
John Davidson, A Random Itinerary (London: John Lane, 1794), 191, 191, 193.
Hereafter abbreviated R and cited parenthetically by page number.
34
As both Stephenson and Taylor point out, by the 1890s rambling had begun to
change from a group of local footpath lobbies (staging mass trespasses) to a recreational
activity sponsored by church and temperance groups and stressing health and moral
improvement in the open air; see Taylor, 45–54. Organizations such as the Co-operative
Holidays Association (founded in 1897) began to package affordable rambling vacations
for urban workers, with set itineraries and lodging. Although these relatively spartan
holidays differed from sightseeing tours boasting all the amenities, increasingly they
emphasized comforts; see Stephenson, 72.
35
Davidson, “In the Isle of Dogs,” in The Last Ballad and Other Poems (London:
John Lane and The Bodley Head, 1899), 131. Similarly, in the poem “November”
(1906), covering much of the same ground as A Random Itinerary, the speaker recalls
wandering “[l]ike a gleeman of the former age” through the Chilterns, where “[s]ound
and colour were my pensioners” (Davidson, “November,” in Holiday and Other Po-
ems [New York: Dutton, 1906], 39). One of Davidson’s best known impressionistic
pieces, “In Romney Marsh” (1894), retains the faint image of the wayfarer’s print in
its balladic opening, “As I went down to Dymchurch Wall, / I heard the South sing
o’er the land” (Davidson, “In Romney Marsh,” in Ballads and Songs [London: John
Lane, 1895], 107).
36
Bourdieu, 3.
37
Bourdieu, 101.
38
Radcliffe, 371. Stanfield (1793–1867), significantly, had begun work as a scenery
painter for private theaters in London and Edinburgh. He was singled out by Ruskin
as a purveyor of the “lower picturesque” (John Ruskin, The Library Edition of the
Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. [London:
George Allen, 1904], 6:15).
39
Writers who have studied the meaning of the picturesque over time have all
remarked on its changeability or its progressive abstraction. According to Carl Paul
Barbier, “[S]o long as the Picturesque formed part of British taste, the adjective evoked
in everyone a clear response” for the noun “had generally accepted pictorial connota-
tions, with regard to both subject-matter and treatment” (William Gilpin: His Drawings,
Teachings, and Theory of the Picturesque [Oxford: Clarendon, 1963], 1). Yet as Barbier
observes, the word had six meanings in George Mason’s supplement to Johnson’s Dic-
tionary of 1801; see Barbier, 98. Alan Liu (Wordsworth: The Sense of History [Palo
Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989]) notes that defining the term is “perennially difficult”
(61). For essays that collectively attest to the expanding uses of the picturesque as a
mode of viewing after the Regency period, see The Politics of Picturesque, ed. Stephen
Copley and Peter Garside (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994).
40
See Elizabeth K. Helsinger, Rural Scenes and National Representation: Britain,
1815–50 (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1997), 3–17. One effect of this nostalgia
was the pastoralization of the picturesque during the century; see Sidney K. Robinson,
Inquiry into the Picturesque (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991), 33.
41
See Alfred William Hunt, “Modern English Landscape Painting,” The Nineteenth
Century 7 (1880): 778–94, esp. 782–83.
42
Gary Harrison and Jill Heydt-Stevenson, “Variations on the Picturesque: Authority,
Play, and Practice,” European Romantic Review 13 (2002): 4, 3. The vast, and gener-

652 Aesthetic Embarrassment

ally excellent, critical literature on the politics of the picturesque includes Ruskin’s
attack on picturesque painting, in the fourth volume of Modern Painters (1856), for
its aestheticization of rural poverty in the Swiss valley of the Zermatt (frequented by
Alpine travelers); see Ruskin, 6:15–24, 390–95. The twentieth-century barrage begins
with John Barrell’s influential The Dark Side of the Landscape (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1980); Ann Bermingham’s Landscape and Ideology (Berkeley: Univ. of
California Press, 1986); and Landscape and Power, ed. W. J. T. Mitchell (Chicago:
Univ. of Chicago Press, 1994). Malcolm Andrews has drawn parallels between aesthetic
tampering with the unspoiled landscape and the actual damage to land by the many
feet and carriages that rutted and muddied the paths to some of the most spectacular
lookouts (The Search for the Picturesque [Palo Alto: Stanford Univ. Press, 1989], 195). Of
additional interest are Michael Rosenthal’s British Landscape Painting (Ithaca: Cornell
Univ. Press, 1982), which suggests that the revival of picturesque through agricultural
landscapes was a fearful reaction to the American Civil War (96); and Liu’s discussion
of the “high picturesque” of the 1780s and 1790s as the “imaginary ground on which
the rights of old property could be adjusted to the demands of new money” (91).
43
Andrews, 122. In defense of the overuse of the vocabulary of the picturesque,
Michasiw points out that tourists “could only write within those conventions, having
no other words” (77).
44
MacCannell, 122.
45
Elizabeth Foster Brown, quoted in H. M. Cundall, Birket Foster (London: Adam
and Charles Black, 1906), 97.
46
See, for example, Uvedale Price’s description of trees, 1:26
47
Brown, quoted in Cundall, 96; Raphael Samuel, Theatres of Memory, 2 vols.
(London: Verso, 1994–1998), 1:27. Samuel’s book, an “ethnographic approach” (17) to
a subject largely dominated by Marxist critiques of heritage based in exposures of false
consciousness, was one of the first signs of a reaction to the attacks on the aesthetic
practices of tourism that had dominated scholarship and journalism for twenty years.
48
Brown, quoted in Cundall, 97.

Linda M. Austin 653