Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book examines the reception of travel books on the United States, Canada, and the Arctic archipelago by British readers, the vast majority of whom never made a transatlantic crossing, is written in the spirit of that manifesto. It aims to find out as much as possible about the 'real readers' that Iser marginalizes in favour of his transcendental alternative, but there is an element of freedom in this notion of a travelling reader that is worth holding onto. St Clair calls this newly enfranchised body of work the 'old canon', and crucially it was literature with an essentially conservative ethos, dominated by imagery of rural England, patriotic sentiments, domestic affections, traditional Christian morality, and natural religion: in the hands of people inducted to the book-buying community for the first time, it 'offered a Counter-Enlightenment to readers who knew nothing of the Enlightenment'.