ABSTRACT

This chapter analyses the types of mental experience described by the travellers, and investigates how those experiences related to contemporary discourses of anti-tourism, Orientalism and Romanticism. It shows how the literature of travel provided a space for expressing a concern with psychological sustainability, which was an important response to the problem of nineteenth-century modernity. The Renaissance pastoral dream was converted, in the works of travel writers David Urquhart, Richard Ford and Alexander Kinglake, into a particularly nineteenth-century project of flight from modernity. A classical and oriental scholar, David Urquhart relished the opportunity to travel through lands where 'habits of ancient days still live and breathe'. He extols the benefits of horseback travel through wild country. Like Urquhart, Ford advocated horseback travel because it enabled the visitor to see sights that would otherwise have been inaccessible in a country with little in the way of transport infrastructure.