ABSTRACT
This chapter describes the aesthetic and ideological impact of the new emphasis on absolute dependability within travel writing, and some of the discernible changes in structure and narrative motif which accompanied this shift. As early as the 1780s, qualities such as eccentricity and individualism which had earlier functioned to demonstrate the proud superiority of British liberty became increasingly problematic. With the French Revolution, their fate was sealed, as they came to constitute a subversive sign of a writer's differentiation of him or herself from the united front of national opinion. In 1796, Richard Polwhele published a lumbering Spenserian hymn to the pleasures of home and Britishness, The Influence of Local Attachment with respect to Home. A crude version of associationism is recruited to explain the natural force of local attachment, which although common to all peoples is peculiarly strong, and morally inflected, in the Britain.
