Among William Hazlitt's essays, "On Going a Journey" and "Why Distant Objects Please," originally... more Among William Hazlitt's essays, "On Going a Journey" and "Why Distant Objects Please," originally published in the second volume of Table Talk (1821-22), present his motives and methods concerning travel as inherently contrarian. This posture accords with Hazlitt's notoriously prickly personality in general. While he loves a good walk, Hazlitt announces from the first sentence of "On Going a Journey" that "I like to go by myself" (Selected Writings 136). The solitary male wanderer is a familiar Romantic trope, but in practice Hazlitt's contemporaries were typically not opposed to company on the road. In his dedication for Descriptive Sketches (1793), Wordsworth praises his youthful traveling companion in France, Robert Jones, by contending that "two companions lolling in a post chaise" lack the heart of gentleman truants who travel on foot (32). The young Byron set out for the Continent with John Cam Hobhouse. While Hazlitt grants the appeal of having a companion when abroad, in the country of his birth he embraces solitary travel as "liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases" (Selected Writings 136). Hazlitt goes on to clarify that he has "no objection" to journeys "with a friend or a party," as long as they seek out typical fashionable objectives, which Hazlitt amusingly sums up as "ruins, aqueducts, pictures" (Selected Writings 145). But the end point, in these encounters, is all. This approach to a journey reduces a day on the road to a destination: "the first consideration always is where we shall go." It leaves no room for Hazlitt's main interestnamely, "what we shall meet with by the way" (145)-which can provide a
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 2015
In a pivotal moment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland commits one of th... more In a pivotal moment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland commits one of the more significant faux pas in the history of the courtship plot: she tells her suitor, Henry Tilney, that she suspects that his father murdered his mother. Henry grants his father's cold and difficult temper. But Henry then sets out to reclaim the Tilney estate from its realm in Catherine's imagination: the continental, Catholic settings of Ann Radcliffe's gothic novels. Instead, Henry identifies the Abbey as a Georgian country home whose problematic cultural origins have long since ceased to be relevant: Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.-Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting? 1
BRITISH AUTHORITIES ESTABLISHED a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had... more BRITISH AUTHORITIES ESTABLISHED a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had shaped the nation's justice for a century: banishment. Before it was interrupted by the American Revolution, transportation had become a cornerstone of criminal sentencing, enabling the development of a legal code whose hundreds of capital crimes were in practice frequently punished by the less severe judgment of exile.' The British knew little about Aus-tralia beyond the sketchy reports produced by Captain James Cook's voyage some 17 years previously. Such ignorance finally did not stop the government from establishing a penal colony there, so desperate were authorities to dispose of a growing backlog of convicts who were sentenced to transportation during the 1780s. During this decade the many convicts who formerly would have been shipped to America had nowhere to go; typhus epidemics caused by overcrowding in jails and prison ships along the Thames meant death sentences for many who supposedly had eluded capital punishment.2 In reinstituting transportation, the Pitt ministry believed it had taken a key step in stabilizing the legal and social status quo. But the birth of the Botany Bay colony would coincide with new challenges to British institutions brought on by the struggles of domestic political reformers, the French Revolution , and the ensuing continental war. These developments led to a popular revision of transportation's significance, a revision given added force by the new penal settlement's location at the opposite end of the world. In particular, representations of seditionaries bound for Botany Bay, of their passage to Aus-tralia, and of life in the colony were colored by social and political developments in Britain. On one hand, early British accounts of Botany Bay emphasized its utter strangeness. Robert Hughes notes that new arrivals saw the continent as "a land of inversions," where the seasons and even the stars displayed themselves in reversed or unfamiliar forms. 3 However, the widespread sense that everything in Australia was symbolically, as well as geographically , upside down enabled observers to use British conventions to
Among William Hazlitt's essays, "On Going a Journey" and "Why Distant Objects Please," originally... more Among William Hazlitt's essays, "On Going a Journey" and "Why Distant Objects Please," originally published in the second volume of Table Talk (1821-22), present his motives and methods concerning travel as inherently contrarian. This posture accords with Hazlitt's notoriously prickly personality in general. While he loves a good walk, Hazlitt announces from the first sentence of "On Going a Journey" that "I like to go by myself" (Selected Writings 136). The solitary male wanderer is a familiar Romantic trope, but in practice Hazlitt's contemporaries were typically not opposed to company on the road. In his dedication for Descriptive Sketches (1793), Wordsworth praises his youthful traveling companion in France, Robert Jones, by contending that "two companions lolling in a post chaise" lack the heart of gentleman truants who travel on foot (32). The young Byron set out for the Continent with John Cam Hobhouse. While Hazlitt grants the appeal of having a companion when abroad, in the country of his birth he embraces solitary travel as "liberty, perfect liberty, to think, feel, do just as one pleases" (Selected Writings 136). Hazlitt goes on to clarify that he has "no objection" to journeys "with a friend or a party," as long as they seek out typical fashionable objectives, which Hazlitt amusingly sums up as "ruins, aqueducts, pictures" (Selected Writings 145). But the end point, in these encounters, is all. This approach to a journey reduces a day on the road to a destination: "the first consideration always is where we shall go." It leaves no room for Hazlitt's main interestnamely, "what we shall meet with by the way" (145)-which can provide a
The Eighteenth Century: Theory and Interpretation, 2015
In a pivotal moment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland commits one of th... more In a pivotal moment in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818), Catherine Morland commits one of the more significant faux pas in the history of the courtship plot: she tells her suitor, Henry Tilney, that she suspects that his father murdered his mother. Henry grants his father's cold and difficult temper. But Henry then sets out to reclaim the Tilney estate from its realm in Catherine's imagination: the continental, Catholic settings of Ann Radcliffe's gothic novels. Instead, Henry identifies the Abbey as a Georgian country home whose problematic cultural origins have long since ceased to be relevant: Remember the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you.-Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? Could they be perpetrated without being known, in a country like this, where social and literary intercourse is on such a footing; where every man is surrounded by a neighbourhood of voluntary spies, and where roads and newspapers lay every thing open? Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting? 1
BRITISH AUTHORITIES ESTABLISHED a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had... more BRITISH AUTHORITIES ESTABLISHED a penal colony in Australia in 1788 to resume a practice that had shaped the nation's justice for a century: banishment. Before it was interrupted by the American Revolution, transportation had become a cornerstone of criminal sentencing, enabling the development of a legal code whose hundreds of capital crimes were in practice frequently punished by the less severe judgment of exile.' The British knew little about Aus-tralia beyond the sketchy reports produced by Captain James Cook's voyage some 17 years previously. Such ignorance finally did not stop the government from establishing a penal colony there, so desperate were authorities to dispose of a growing backlog of convicts who were sentenced to transportation during the 1780s. During this decade the many convicts who formerly would have been shipped to America had nowhere to go; typhus epidemics caused by overcrowding in jails and prison ships along the Thames meant death sentences for many who supposedly had eluded capital punishment.2 In reinstituting transportation, the Pitt ministry believed it had taken a key step in stabilizing the legal and social status quo. But the birth of the Botany Bay colony would coincide with new challenges to British institutions brought on by the struggles of domestic political reformers, the French Revolution , and the ensuing continental war. These developments led to a popular revision of transportation's significance, a revision given added force by the new penal settlement's location at the opposite end of the world. In particular, representations of seditionaries bound for Botany Bay, of their passage to Aus-tralia, and of life in the colony were colored by social and political developments in Britain. On one hand, early British accounts of Botany Bay emphasized its utter strangeness. Robert Hughes notes that new arrivals saw the continent as "a land of inversions," where the seasons and even the stars displayed themselves in reversed or unfamiliar forms. 3 However, the widespread sense that everything in Australia was symbolically, as well as geographically , upside down enabled observers to use British conventions to
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