ABSTRACT
This chapter illustrates the increasing displacement of aristocratic Grand Tourists by generally middle-class writers, whether amateur or professional, sentimental or splenetic, Whig or Tory. It addresses the question of how national and authorial character become more class-inflected and increasingly come to deploy the gendered virtues of common sense and patriotism. The 1760s and 1770s were energetic and argumentative years for British travel writing. Travel writing becomes a site of struggle for competing claims to moral virtue – claims which are frequently expressed in the gender-inflected language of class and nation. The chapter explores the controversial relationship between the travel writings of Tobias Smollett and Philip Thicknesse, and between Samuel Sharp and Joseph Baretti. It then addresses the explicitly political aspect of the antagonism, and examines how authorial good character and the ability to engage in rational debate become signs of British male subjecthood which Thicknesse attempts valiantly to reconfigure.
