Aesthetic Embarrassment: The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism

Abstract

Aesthetic Embarrassment:The Reversion to the Picturesque in Nineteenth-Century English Tourism 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 written, "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 connoisseurship. 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 material 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 [End Page 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 appreciation 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 profited from improvements in agriculture and tourism. The attention of "green language" to the weather, lighting effects, birds, and botanical life reflected the lonely imaginations of its users and registered, as Williams...