ABSTRACT
In the summer of 1786, Miles Dawson, a Yorkshire surveyor and gentleman farmer, offered his 16-year-old daughter Eliza a choice of holidays: six weeks in London or a tour of Scotland. She chose Scotland, in part because of her ‘romantic associations with Scottish scenery’, and in an autobiography written late in life, Eliza Fletcher – as she then was – nostalgically recalled her pleasure in following ‘the ordinary tourist route’ through Scotland.1 Fletcher’s interest in Scottish scenery was fairly typical for a leisured young woman of her generation, since, in the words of Alastair J. Durie, by the end of the eighteenth century ‘tourism in the form of a trip or journey for education, amusement, or health was become part of the established routine of those who could afford the money and time’ and Scotland provided both ‘a respectable and a safe destination’.2 Safety and respectability tended not to feature heavily in the works of many of the male travellers among Fletcher’s contemporaries, however; on the contrary, from Samuel Johnson onwards, they apparently preferred to emphasize the wild, the primitive, and the dangerous in their accounts of Scotland. It might, admittedly, seem easy enough to explain these very different versions of Scottish travel through geography as well as gender: Fletcher not only dutifully followed the itinerary laid out by her male hosts and travel companions but also stayed safely within the more accessible southern fringes of the Highlands. Yet the narrative of male travellers as explorers, blazing the way for less adventurous female tourists to follow in their footsteps, has remained powerful, even as it misrepresents the complexity of women’s place in the literature of late eighteenth-century Scottish tourism. In this chapter, I will examine the contributions of women to the creation of Scotland as a tourist destination and argue that paying closer attention to the roles of women demonstrates the tenuousness of any gender-based opposition between the pursuit of adventure and the decorous pleasures of tourism. As I argue, focusing on the roles of women as both travellers and objects of the tourist gaze in fact suggests the inextricability of these two modes of travel and travel writing.
