ABSTRACT
Appropriately for a conference on British culture in the 1830s, the author take preaching as a serious genre, and start with texts. They come from a remarkable sequence of letters that Charles Lyell wrote to his erstwhile geological companion Roderick Murchison, immediately after his fieldwork in Sicily on the eve of the 1830s. The practices of geology included, more prominently than any other, the practice of outdoor fieldwork. It was this that enjoyed a popularity unmatched before or since. The differentiating effects of the empirical inputs that Lyell experienced during his fieldwork show themselves even more clearly in the way his itinerary was modified in the light of what he saw. That prescription was modified significantly, however, in the second of the texts the author quoted: not just travel, but – in effect – ‘Travel! Write! Travel!’ Once again, this indicates how self-consciously Lyell was integrating his practice of largely solo fieldwork with that of communal debate.
