ABSTRACT
The home tour of Britain is described by Celia Fiennes at the turn of the eighteenth century as useful and profitable for the traveller.Both men and women would benefit from journeying their ‘native Land’, she claims; it would ‘add much to its Glory and esteem in our minds and cure the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts’.1 In urging her fellow British travellers to turn their backs on the Continent and explore their own island, Fiennes reveals an anxiety about ‘foreign’ sites of travel being elevated above those of home. By presenting the desire for foreign exploration through the language of immorality and disease she figures the increasing interest in travel abroad not as a positive impulse towards discovery and knowledge, but as contagion. In contrast, the home tour is proffered as ‘cure’, as restorative. And, importantly, it is presented as contributing to a sense of patriotic pride, one constructed ‘in our minds’ to form an imagined state of nationhood and community.2 Her own travel writing, and that of the travellers who came after her, contributes to, negotiates and sometimes fractures that perception of Britain as nation.
