ABSTRACT
When Austen’s heroine Elizabeth Bennett enthusiastically declares her resolve to make sense of the landscapes that she anticipates meeting in the Lake District (a site which her home tour journey fails to actually reach), she voices organizational concerns that are expressed repeatedly in nonfictional travel narratives, and that are paradigmatic of a European tradition of systematization and classification observable in numerous contemporary creative and intellectual projects. Her desire for accuracy, knowledge and precise recollection, and her determination to avoid imaginative chaos, echo the sentiments of many travel writers journeying both at home and abroad. These writers were well aware of the demands and expectations of a reading public who judged travel narratives produced at this time according to their perceived veracity, authenticity, organization and exactitude. Those criteria, by which travel accounts were condemned or condoned, were part of a European Enlightenment zeitgeist which fervently sought to see and know the world, to navigate it, organize it, classify it and record each stage of physical, visual and intellectual cognition for future generations. The organizational impulses captured and playfully satirized by Austen in the words of Lizzie Bennett, which echo so precisely the concerns of women’s home tour travel writing, can only be fully understood within the context of the wider tradition of exploration and writing, classification and organization, of which they are a part. This chapter traces the emergence of that tradition through three of the eighteenth century’s most significant systematizing projects. It then moves on to consider the ways in which the organizational spirit of the age became manifest in the travelling and authorial practices of the women who traversed the island of Great Britain.
