Introduction

This chapter explores English tourists’ interest in Scotland in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as a means of examining middle and upper-class popular consciousness. As the pace of economic, social, and political transformations intensified in England in the nineteenth century, English tourists came to envision the north as a place immune to change, and understood journeys there to be antidotes to the uncertainties of modern life. Scholars – and participants, as well – frequently differentiate between ‘travel’ and ‘tourism’. ‘Travelers’ strike out on their own, seeing themselves as engaging in open-minded explorations of that which is foreign. Tourism, on the other hand, tends to keep the foreign at bay. Tourism’s imperialistic tendencies were particularly marked in the Highlands, an area which some scholars claim operated as an internal colony within Scotland. Both Lowland and English tourists could agree that Highlanders were ‘the Other’ and acted towards them accordingly.