ABSTRACT
By the middle of the eighteenth century in Britain travellers were increasingly viewing Britain through a romantic frame which privileged the picturesque, a ‘pleasing melancholy’, and through the sublime. While a sublime sensibility sought out wild, mountainous landscapes, the picturesque sought ‘irregular forms in natural scenery and the works of man [sic]’ (Andrews 1989, 45). Writers like Gilpin in his Observations on the River Wye (1782) suggested that, henceforth, travellers view the country by the rules of the picturesque. This entailed not only an aestheticizing vision but within it a focus upon the remote, the primitive, the humble and the ruined (Andrews 1989, 64). Such a romantic discursive frame was not to be restricted to Britain. Imperialism meant that it could be applied to new fields of vision.
