ABSTRACT
Sentimental travel writing drew, as Park’s account did, on older traditions of what I have been calling survival literature-first-person stories of shipwrecks, castaways, mutinies, abandonments, and (the special inland version) captivities. Popular since Europe’s first wave of expansion in the late fifteenth century, this literature continued to flourish in its own right in the eighteenth century, as it does today. Though its lowbrow sensationalism was challenged by the bourgeois forms of authority I have been discussing in this book, popular survival literature benefited from the growth of mass print culture. Survivors returning from shipwrecks or captivities could finance their fresh start by writing up their stories for sale in inexpensive pamphlets or collections. In 1759, for example, the Monthly Review announced the availability of a fourth edition “with considerable improvements” of French and Indian Cruelty: Exemplified in the Life, and Various Vicissitudes of Fortune, of Peter Williarnson, in which the reader is promised accounts of Williamson’s kidnapping as a child, and his life as a slave, planter, Indian captive, and volunteer soldier, as well as of “Scalping, Burning, and other Barbarities,” all at one shilling. Adds the Monthly Review. “We imagine the story of Peter Williamson to be, in general, matter of fact with a few pardonable embellishments by the hand of some literary friend. It is printed for the benefit of the unfortunate Author.”1
