ABSTRACT
In 1790, the intrepid traveller, John Byng, Viscount Torrington, embarked on a tour of some of the Midland counties in pursuit of quiet, picturesque scenery. This was a region of Britain increasingly renowned for its burgeoning industrial productivity rather than its picturesque beauty, and Byng was frequently frustrated in his desire to seek refuge from the noise and bustle of the city. It was to satisfy a desire for quietness that he had decided to travel alone, or almost alone; despite his insistence that travelling on horseback rather than by coach distinguished his wholesome exercise from the idleness of the modern ‘fine’ gentry, he had taken with him a servant to ensure that he did not have to do too much exercise. Apparently, riding and sightseeing were arduous enough. Although Byng occasionally wished for genteel company, to travel in a party, he noted, would court ‘schis’ms and wrangles’, and he was a man of solitary pleasures, a lover of retirement, fond of the ‘shaded sequester’d vale’. So conscientious was he to avoid company that when a fellow traveller began to ride alongside him and make conversation, he remained ‘glum’ until this unwanted companion ‘push’d forward’, complaining in his diary ‘I come abroad for quiet, country air, fresh scenery, and to go my own way and my own pace; to escape from London blockheads, and the many who will, without caring for you, ask how you do?’ Metropolitan manners, Byng everywhere made clear, had penetrated deep into the countryside, and, as the land was given over to lead-mining and large-scale cotton manufacturing, an influx of noise was destroying the beauty as well as the integrity of rural life. ‘Every pastoral vale’, he complained in another tour, now throbbed with the discordant din of industrial activity and the drunken, rebellious voices of industrial workers. 1 As Anna Seward wrote of a similar development at Coalbrookdale, the ‘silent reign’ of nature was being ‘usurpt’ by the ‘mingled tones’ of ‘pond’rous’, clanging engines, of shouting and of restive, clamouring ‘artificers, with brazen throats’. 2
