<i>The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination Elizabeth A. Dolan The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination. By Carl Thompson. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Pp. xii + 299. ISBN 9780199259984. £45.00. In The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination, Carl Thompson explores the ways in which misadventure came to be highly valued in canonical Romanticism. After cataloguing the tropes or 'scripts' inherent in exploration and maritime adventure narratives, Thompson offers a compelling analysis of the implications of these sources for understanding major poems by Wordsworth and Byron. Although he ultimately writes a successful book, Thompson's explanation of his methodology and scope in the introduction is troubling. Defining his historical scope as 1780–1830, Thompson explicitly excludes women authors from consideration, citing as justification Anne Mellor's and Marlon Ross's seminal studies from the late 1980s, both of which identify a 'masculine' agenda within canonical Romanticism. It is puzzling that Thompson does not take into account the extensive body of scholarship of the last twenty years that builds on these early studies to explore the nuances of gender, specifically in travel writing. On the topic of suffering in travel, one thinks, for example, of Mary Wollstonecraft's Letters from Norway, not least because Percy Bysshe Shelley, whom Thompson discusses in connection with Byron, read the travel narrative on his elopement trip with Mary Shelley. To explore Wollstonecraft's text as a 'script' or even anti-script for Shelley's and Byron's traveller personae would serve to deepen rather than to diminish Thompson's argument. In his first chapter, Thompson offers a helpful explication of the term 'tourist' in the Romantic era, cataloguing the types of travellers – Grand Tourists, picturesque tourists and female tourists – with whom the Romantic anti-tourist contrasts himself. The chapter argues that [End Page 182] Wordsworth and Byron signify their radicalism and disdain for these other modes of tourism by travelling on foot and by emphasising their own suffering and discomfort. Thompson then dives into the archive of the Romantic-era 'Voyages and Travels' genre, and here his careful readings and captivating insights engage, educate and entertain the reader. Chapters 1 and 2 explore the existential and political resonances of narratives written by various 'misadventurers', particularly sailors and survivors of shipwrecks. Thompson deftly identifies the rhetorical and interpretive conventions that make up four categories of misadventure narrative: the providentialist's misadventure, in which the hero's salvation, or, alternatively, his suffering, is 'evidence of election'; the empiricist's fragmented observations; the sceptic's account of a random universe; the sentimentalist's focus on the sufferer rather than God. In each case, shipwreck narratives function as sites of exploration for religious contestations and existential anxieties. Likewise, the 'topos of suffering in travel', Thompson argues, offered writers a vehicle through which to express social and political concerns, particularly in their sympathetic identification with figures such as wanderers, vagrants, exiles and, especially, maritime adventurers. Accounts of the hierarchy on board a ship depict civil authority structures, while accounts of mutiny play out resistance to those structures. Shipwreck narratives thus offer a microcosm for analysing political ideals and conflict in an age of revolution. By Chapter 4, one feels oneself in the hands of an excellent historical and intellectual guide, as Thompson describes the 'exploration "mania" [that] gripped British culture in the Romantic period'. Here Thompson builds upon the scholarship of Nigel Leask, Mary Louise Pratt, Tim Fulford, Debbie Lee and Peter J. Kitson to analyse the various ways in which the Romantic imagination constructs the figure of the explorer. He identifies objectivism as one of the primary features of the 'house style' of exploration narratives, and elaborates the ways in which narratives by James Bruce and Mungo Park violate this house style with their emotional accounts of disaster, and thus fuel the major Romantic poets' interest in misadventure. The payoff of this archival and historical work comes in the final two chapters, one on Wordsworth's poetry and the other on Byron's. In his careful reading of the Mount Snowdon episode of The Prelude, Thompson identifies a residue of the Providentialist shipwreck narrative. If Wordsworth looks to those who suffer or survive shipwrecks to convey...