ABSTRACT
Even naming the period during which the travel journals to be evoked in this study were written is not without critical weight. Few contemporary scholars examining this essentially eighteenth-century domain would now refer to the Age of Reason or the Augustan Age - such denominations appear excessively schematic, marshalling diversity into a single, reified unit.2 As Pat Rogers remarked, 'few students of the period today would talk of the Augustan age, except as a neutral historical shorthand which enables them to point without describing or explaining' .3 If we ground our study in historical reality, the era can simply be labelled Georgian or Hanoverian. Like 1660, when Charles II was restored to the throne, 1714 is of course a key date when evoking political and historical chronology, marking the coronation of George I. Yet if one turns to literary chronology, this second date is far less significant, for Defoe and Swift had already written some of their works by this time. On the other hand, in the second half of the century, a turning point can indeed be identified. It is sometimes referred to (perhaps in a slightly hackneyed manner) as the moment when Reason gave way to the Age of Sensibility. Pope's death in 1744 is often cited as the beginning of this new era. The publication of Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads in 1798 marks a decisive literary landmark at the century's end.
