ABSTRACT
In his chapter, Nigel Leask explores the influential travel writing of the Welsh ‘enlightenment savant’ Thomas Pennant (in some respects a real-life manifestation of Smollett’s Matthew Bramble), focusing on the concern with improvement that underpinned Pennant’s 1772 Tour in Scotland and Voyage to the Hebrides. In contrast to the pessimistic account of Scotland’s periphery given by Samuel Johnson three years later, Pennant saw rich potential in the Highlands and islands. Leask recreates a moment when the future of the area was in the balance, with an affluent, improved landscape visible at least to Pennant’s imagination. Influenced by the planned developments then underway in the annexed Jacobite estates, Pennant’s discussion offers both encouragement and constructive critique. He rhetorically appropriates the power of ‘second sight’ in prognosticating a bright future—albeit one fissured by contradiction. Leask investigates Pennant’s methods alongside the material and ideological basis for his work, which resulted in a new form of enlightened travel narrative, at once rigorous scientific survey and popular entertainment. He recovers the Welshman’s sizeable role in developing perceptions of Scotland, as well as his crucial articulation of the ideology of improvement, with the Scottish landscape emerging as an ideal canvas. Leask registers the historical failures signified today by the enduring role of the Scottish Highlands as an attractive ‘wilderness’, yet his chapter plots the contested history behind this status, establishing Pennant’s legacy as a prime agent of the complex improving zeitgeist during the long eighteenth century.
