"Nearest Approach to Fairyland":Mythologising Scotland in Nineteenth-Century Edinburgh Periodical Travel-Writing and Tourism Advertisements
This article investigates descriptions of the Scottish landscape in travel writing and tourism advertisements published in Tait's Edinburgh Magazine and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine from 1800 to 1900. Its main objective is to analyze the ways in which periodical nature writing simultaneously created a vicarious interaction with the countryside for the reader and revealed the effects that increased human presence had on the land. The essay shows how the creation of landscape narratives without a distinct narrator came to contribute to the interplay between the mythologized, untouched Scottish countryside and the physical land that was steadily changing as a result of human interference.
In 1847, Tait's Edinburgh Magazine published Sir Thomas Dick Lauder's account of his visit to Sutherland in northwest Scotland, which described the mountain that overlooked the beach as "[rising] in a bold craggy steep, where Nature [bid] defiance to the efforts of man to put any trace of his dominion upon it."1 Lauder, an Edinburgh-born author of romances and travel writing in the early to mid-nineteenth century, personified nature as a supernatural figure knowingly and actively inviting any challenge from humans. This portrayal is not so surprising, as the practice of depicting geographical fringe regions as spaces of wildness untamed by civilisation had been semi-standardised by the Enlightenment tradition of comparing peoples and regimes. As Romanticism emerged from the Enlightenment as a literary movement in the mid- to late eighteenth century, its emphasis on nature yielded travel writing that often combined in-depth descriptions of landscape with the writer's impressions of the tangible or intangible space.2 But Lauder's suggestion that nature actively challenges humans who seek to leave their "trace" reflects something more particular about his historical moment.
In the nineteenth century, as expanding road and railway systems allowed the middle classes access to affordable trips to the coast and country-side, the domestic tourism industry grew. The growth also occurred in England and Wales, a process that helped create an organised national trail system, which allowed tourists to travel through marked public and scenic footpaths with trailheads in or near urban centres, such as Edinburgh or Glasgow.3 The draw among Scottish tourists to rural landscapes began to develop in the mid- to late eighteenth century as the concept of "romantic [End Page 88] walking" emerged, which promoted walking for leisure rather than necessity; by the turn of the century, it also developed an association with the natural sciences, an academic discipline that, at the time, included folklore collection.4 In conjunction with this broadening tourist industry, periodicals had begun publishing serialised accounts of travel, tourism advertisements, and less easily categorised texts that also provided detailed descriptions of the landscape. Nineteenth-century portrayals of the countryside found in serialised periodical travel writing often drew their imagery from folklore, myth, history, and the natural sciences to evoke the sense that the landscape was of an otherworld, which was a notable change from the upper-class, epistolary accounts of the Grand Tour that dominated the genre in the eighteenth century.5 The nineteenth-century periodical articles helped create a complex, ever-evolving perception of the landscape as a presence rather than a concatenation of geological, botanical, and zoological systems and formations. Arguably, the purpose was to narrate through landscape; the narrator, whether that was a traveller or an abstract advertiser, was secondary in importance to the land through which they ventured. The use of nature as a narrative method persisted in written and pictorial depictions of the Scottish landscape throughout the nineteenth century, despite transitions of literary and artistic movements. Separate articles on folklore, travel and tourism, and botanical or zoological study frequently appeared alongside each other in periodicals like Tait's or Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which were written in the same Romantic style and subsequently led to the association of Scotland's countryside with folktales or legend.
By analysing depictions of the Scottish landscape in travel accounts, tourism advertisements, and articles on folklore published in Tait's and Blackwood's, as well as other Scottish periodicals, this article explores nineteenth-century human encounters with both a real and imagined Scottish landscape. Indeed, periodical travel writing about Scotland reveals a simultaneous mythologising of the "wild" countryside as an imagined concept and the impact of human interference on the physical landscape. In their unwaveringly picturesque portrayal of the landscape, these texts demonstrate not only how the topography changed as a result of the com-modification of the countryside but also how the human landscape was transformed by increased access to and interest in tourism. Lauder's statement from Tait's typifies the dual effect: there was, at once, "nature" and "Nature," which could best be viewed in relation to the "efforts of man" to "put any trace" on spaces of perceived, untamed wildness.6
Of course, anthropomorphising nature was a common literary practice that stretched far beyond the geographical confines of Scotland or chronological limits of the nineteenth century, and a full investigation into the [End Page 89] trend calls for more depth of detail than an individual article permits. My examination of Scottish nature writing in periodicals that were first published in Edinburgh is thus a case study of a larger cultural trend, as similar texts appeared in periodicals published in Glasgow, Dundee, and other cities.7 Though Edinburgh will be the grounding point for texts that compare the curated countryside near urban centres to the mythologised wildness farther away, my choice of case study has less to do with the city itself and more with Blackwood's and Tait's, the primary periodicals discussed. These periodicals circulated widely throughout the UK with a significant readership in London, but they both began publication in Edinburgh.8 Both had a predominantly middle-class audience, though as Alexis Easley explains, Tait's sought to cultivate a class dialogue through articles, prose, and poetry that incorporated working-class issues and voices.9 I have deliberately chosen to exclude, for the most part, journals with mainly working-class audiences; even as opportunities for travel lost the most rigid of their restrictions and the tourism industry expanded, the middle classes, which James Buzard details in his analysis of the "authentic" cultural experience, were primarily the ones to benefit from the change.10 Moreover, Tait's and Blackwood's stood in political opposition to one another. Simply put, Blackwood's was a Tory magazine while Tait's focused on radical reform.11 These core political views wove in and out of nature writing throughout the nineteenth century, particularly in the magazines' concern with fostering a Scottish readership. As Michael Hyde explains, Tait's was significantly cheaper than other monthly periodicals, allowing it to reach a more expansive audience, and it paid close attention to Scottish topics, from Scottish education reform to controversies in the Presbyterian Church to Scottish poetry reviews.12 While Blackwood's published material on Scottish politics as well, its numerous regional tales showcased a cultural Scottish identity that sprouted from post-Enlightenment nationalist discourse.13 These periodicals were rivals in sales and circulation in Scotland, and thus, texts from them can be productively juxtaposed.
Using a thematic rather than chronological order, I begin with the stylistic change of travel writing from epistolary to novel form in the early nineteenth century, then transition into the significance that mode of travel played in the narrative. From there, I consider the tie between nature writing's use of local beliefs or customs for allusion and the perception of the folklorist-as-traveller seen in texts on Scottish folklore. I then analyse the effect of the clearances and depopulation on Scottish nature writing, including tourism advertisements, before delving into the different forms of texts targeted at or relating to tourists. Though each thematic aspect has its own section, none exists in a void. The significance of folklore is threaded throughout, as it is a key factor to the nineteenth-century process [End Page 90] of mythologising the Scottish landscape. Moreover, I focus on the short, segmented travel pieces that routinely appeared in periodicals, as a common publication practice was to release only excerpts of longer works at a time. It is important to note that, as a result, the published accounts provided less of an individual's experience with the countryside than a tour through the landscape for the reader. In nature writing, regardless of whether this was the author's intention, the narrator became the reader's avatar for the journey, and the imagery the method for providing a complete experience.
From Epistolary to Novel Form
Prior to the late eighteenth century, tourism had yet to develop in its modern form.14 However, among the aristocracy and upper classes, the Grand Tour assumed a similar role, promoting travel to classical historic sites across Europe for the sake of educational and cultural improvement. Eventually, this came to include the middle class as well.15 The Grand Tour continued after the introduction of romantic tourism at the turn of the century, but the inclusiveness of it decreased.16 Likewise, periodicals across Britain published excerpts from larger epistolary texts on the Grand Tour, written by both men and women. Unlike nineteenth-century nature-based travel writing, many letters on the tour mused on art, architecture, and history.17 Often, epistolary travel writing from the Grand Tour included allusions to classical mythology, depending on location. Additionally, letters were not for the addressee's private consumption, but instead, writers constructed a narrative not unlike those found in fiction.18 The route is the plot, the location the setting, and the writer the protagonist.
Even after romantic rambling in the much closer local countryside emerged as the Grand Tour's alternative, serialised letter accounts did not entirely disappear as a preferred style for some travel writers.19 In these letters, writers described the landscape and the local populations in much the same language that travellers of the Grand Tour used to describe cities. One example, from Tait's in 1836, explains that "a busy week" of "rambling and climbing, touring and detouring" caused the author to "neglect" her writing; she goes on to say, "I have no hope of giving you the faintest idea of [Contin and Strathconan's] passing loveliness and variety in river, lake-let, and woodland … and birch and broom-clad knolls, hanging shaws, and sylvan glades everywhere."20 Her mythic allusions are not to the classics but rather local folklore; she writes, "But where I have been is, without a doubt, the nearest approach to Fairyland of which this dim world affords any glimpse."21 The other travellers and local residents become the characters in the story that the writer relates to her addressee and readers, but [End Page 91] the scenes transition through changes in the landscape rather than direct character interactions. The author's encounter with the landscape is almost devotional, as seen through her repeated allusions to fairyland, ghosts, and the rural population's "superstitious" charms, which create an atmosphere of unreality.22 Where "this dim world" is the everyday, the landscape she encounters at Contin and Strathconan offers a peek into someplace extraordinary and beguiling.23 Ultimately, this interaction with the landscape results in a delay in human interaction, as conducted through letter writing. Within the letter, the landscape, of which the local people are part, is not only the tale of her interaction's setting but also the means to tell it. Where the Grand Tour promoted the educational significance of travels abroad, these serialised letters depicting Scotland's countryside promoted a desire for an altogether different experience that stressed the importance of the nation's natural beauty and its "dying" culture.24
Blackwood's and Tait's both followed the transition from epistolary accounts to novel form by publishing serialised travel writing. These began with accounts of the Grand Tour and continued into recollections of forays into rural Scotland. The transition was necessary; by the turn of the century, the Grand Tour's dynamics had changed due to sociopolitical and cultural shifts locally, nationally, and internationally, such as the growth of romantic tourism, the French Revolution, and Napoleonic Wars.25 Initially, travel writing about the Scottish countryside also appeared in letter form, but it shifted early in the nineteenth century to diary entries. Later travel accounts could also bear a structure visually similar to the novel, which consisted of paragraphs and dialogue.26 Regardless, these texts, like the epistolary ones before them, used detailed imagery to tell a story through the landscape that was also about the landscape, which subsequently created a narrative with geography at its centre. However, travel texts with a narrative structure more in line with fiction told their story in a largely linear fashion. The others, such as those written and published by natural scientists, typically had a linear core but were more prone to analepses, prolepses, or anecdotal digressions.27
In periodicals, where only segments of a travel text could appear at a time, disordered narratives gained a neater thread, becoming more coherent for a serialised state. Publishers typically specified at the beginning of the first instalment that the segments were not a complete work, and later instalments indicated where readers might find the others.28 For readers familiar with Edinburgh and Scotland, this likely did not remove the landscape nor journey from its historio-geographical context in the serialised accounts of travelling in the Scottish countryside. Surrounding works, like Blackwood's regional tales and ruminations on national character or Tait's articles on Scottish Reform and academic advancement, emphasised what [End Page 92] was "Scottish" in contrast to what came from beyond its borders.29 As the surrounding works were diverse in their subject matter, they generally included articles or stories that involved the Scottish landscape. This corresponded with the tradition among romantic travellers, along with the travellers who followed, to emulate patterns in their observations, modes of transportation, and writing found in the works of natural scientists and, by extension, collectors of "traditional stories," a loosely defined category that gained the title "folklore" after the antiquarian William Thoms coined the term in 1846.30 The connection is unsurprising, as the practice of "striking out" into the countryside to collect information on domestic flora and fauna and on the culture of the domestic rural peasantry emerged in late eighteenth-century Germany and Sweden, respectively.31 As a result, Hanna Hodacs explains, by the nineteenth century the countryside developed into the "field," an unconfined space for study where, unlike the laboratory, professionals and amateurs were able to work with each other, the local people, and the land.32
Mode of Travel
Between the emergence of the field and the changing views on rambling between 1800 and 1850, pedestrianism evolved as the favoured mode of transportation for travellers as well as collectors of tales, material artefacts, and biological specimens. The shift in perspective on romantic rambling occurred gradually since, at the end of the eighteenth century, a significant percentage of the rural and working classes still walked out of necessity.33 Eventually, the introduction of the bicycle further changed the dynamic of "striking out," but in the early to midcentury, leisurely walking was certainly the most romantic form of transportation because it brought pedestrians closest "to nature" and, as a result, to the land and the native population that lived there.34 Of course, that is not to say that every travel writer turned to rambling as their favoured method.35 As an example, an account of an 1807 "tour through the Highlands" from Scots Magazine and Edinburgh Literary Miscellany does not specify how the writer reaches each destination, but it mentions once that the "ride down the side of Lochlomond was highly pleasing" and, soon after, that the group had to stop to "feed their horses at the Tabert."36 Perhaps the original publication dedicates more detail to the horses and whether the group rode on horseback or by carriage, and perhaps not; within the periodical excerpt, what matters at the onset is the itinerary and the narrator's experience with the landscape at each location. At the beginning and end of the journey, the account also juxtaposes Edinburgh's curated landscape with the wildness of the Highlands. [End Page 93]
In an account published a month earlier, the writer reports that "the fields in the immediate vicinity of Edinburgh are mostly occupied in rising greens, pot-herbs, and fruits, or in pastures. This seems to be the common and most profitable system of economy."37 Compare this to the writer's depiction of the northwest in the later account:
For a considerable way up the side of [Loch Ness], the road is quite level, keeping parallel to the water. … The great fall in this river claims the attention and admiration of every traveller. We did not see it to the very best advantage, though the river was a good deal swelled by the rains which had fallen the preceding day. It is a grand object; presenting a considerable stream of water precipitated over rocks upwards of two hundred feet of perpendicular height. During its fall a part of it is converted into vapour, or spray, which is seen rising like smoke at a distance, when approaching it.38
The writer creates a sense that the countryside in Edinburgh's "immediate vicinity" is open to view and well tended; alternatively, the image of the "rocky, steep and elevated summits" rising above the "grand object" elicits an oppressive mood, especially in combination with the simile likening the water's misting spray to smoke.39 The mode of transportation remains vague, the travel companions mentioned just as infrequently, and the writer, too, is largely bleached of distinguishing characteristics, so what remains at the forefront of the work, and therefore at its narrative's heart, is the landscape. By focusing on the contrast of separate landscapes, the serialised text highlights how the land around Edinburgh was changing in reaction to the agrarian economy in the early nineteenth century and, other than the road, does not acknowledge any "traces" of human interaction with nature in the Highlands.40
Periodical portrayals of the Scottish landscape as an untamed space ready to be conquered, or an untouched land ready to be discovered, continued into the midcentury. In regard to mode of travel, pedestrianism placed the traveller in the closest contact with that space, as was its intended purpose. A self-contained account in Blackwood's offers a detailed description of romantic rambling, where the author claims that "the ascent of [the Cairngorms] is one of the simplest operations in all pedestrianism."41 The author writes, "At first we clamber over the roots and fallen trunks of trees; but by degrees we leave the forest girdle behind, and precipices and snow, with a scant growth of heather, become our sole companion. Keeping the track where the slope of the hill is gentlest, we pass on the right Loch Etichan, lying like a drop of ink at the base of a huge dark mural precipice."42 However, despite these direct depictions of rambling, the account does not focus on the ramblers themselves. The writer routinely addresses the reader, [End Page 94] discussing "the traveller" in the abstract and describing the surrounding physical geography through comparative imagery that draws connection between the "howling wilderness" and the familiar.43 The itinerary is the author's but the story is not, for what it succeeds most in doing is to lead the reader through the Cairngorms. There is, as a result, a twofold interaction with the landscape: the one that physically occurred to the writer and the one that the reader experiences as a vicarious traveller.
Inevitably, the writer's perception of the landscape colours the portrayal of it; this, in turn, influences the reader's perception and experience. The text from Blackwood's depicts the Cairngorms, like the Highlands' wildness, as lonely, untamed, and thus beautiful, which contributed to the image of the Scottish landscape as otherworldly. And we see an even more direct connection between this mythologisation and the interplay of land, culture, narration, and imagery found in periodical genres other than travel writing.
The Folklorist as Traveller
Travel writing, tourism advertisements, and articles on the arts, history, and natural sciences often alluded not only to each other but also to famous literature, poetry, Greco-Roman mythology, and, by the early nineteenth century, regional folk beliefs, figures, and customs. Articles (which are best defined as short texts relaying information about a topic), advertisements (which promote a service, product, or destination), and travel writing (which are direct accounts or descriptions of travel) all utilised allusion as a method to romanticise the Scottish topography. By the midcentury, alluding to Scottish or, more broadly, British or Celtic folklore had a historic precedent in British landscape narratives, including those of travel. Folk revivals in Britain resulted in a popularisation of fairy faith that entered into society from both the scientific and cultural spheres.44 Folkloric creatures or traditional customs and beliefs appeared as references in travel and tourism texts, which further muddled the division between fact and storytelling in periodicals' wide-ranging publications.
The materials in texts about folklore often, or at least ideally, came from what amateur or professional scholars' gathered during forays into the field, where physical presence and interaction with the local people and landscape were fundamental aspects of proving researchers' connection to their subject of study.45 National character commonly appeared as an underlying theme in nineteenth-century scholarship about Scottish folklore, and it was also typical in scholarship on comparative mythology and folklore published elsewhere. Like travel texts, articles on Scottish folklore presented the writer as an external focaliser for the peasant storyteller's [End Page 95] folktale; they might contain moments of homodiegetic narration, where the writer participated directly in the story, but they were primarily heterodiegetic. Excerpts from texts that presented a professional or amateur collector of folklore as a traveller were frequently preoccupied with depicting the landscape as supernatural through alternately haunting and sentimental imagery. Like the excerpts from travel texts, they lost their context upon publication. Periodicals often published sections where the collector, as the external narrator, and the storyteller, as the text's dominant voice, were rarely if ever mentioned explicitly. These decontextualised sections were predominantly found in excerpts published in the early nineteenth century, such as "Popular Superstitions of Clydesdale" (1818). Like the travel writing of the time, this article is epistolary. In a brief introduction to the editor, the writer states, "With extreme interest and with delight, mingled with piercing terror, have I formerly listened, however, every night for weeks and months to these frightful tales … of the Fairies, Brownies, Witches, Kelpies, &c. who still linger amongst our hills and glens, as loth to forsake that beloved land."46
Arguably, the folklorist was also a type of travel writer, especially those who took to striking out to interact with the peasantry rather than sending others to collect for them.47 In published excerpts and articles on Scottish folklore, writers and publishers tended to pay special attention to the connection between folkloric creatures and the landscape, "wherein they formerly reigned with unquestionable dominion."48 For readers familiar with the geography described, folklore writing tied together the present and past by describing a space that was simultaneously real and mythologised.49 Romantic description in travel texts led to the same effect. That effect was intensified in narratives that alluded to familiar aspects of Scottish folklore. The styles of travel and folklore writing remained analogous, with care placed on telling the tale through detailed imagery that allowed it to maintain its geographical context. It was also not unusual for travel writers to reference other authors associated with folklore or the collection of traditional customs and beliefs more generally. In the account of the journey through the Cairngorms, for example, the writer describes, "One or two ghastly white stones [stand] erect out of the blackness like druidical remains, [carrying] the eye along its surface to the dusky and mysterious ruins of Inverlochy Castle, which has so sadly puzzled antiquarians."50 At once, the writer alludes to folklore (in the form of druids), geography (the famous castle ruins and the standing stones), and those who collected or studied information about both (antiquarians). Throughout the nineteenth century, the similarity between these genres strengthened steadily: segments from folklore collections gradually stopped mentioning the narrator and instead focused on the tale itself, and travel texts lost their narrator in favour of depicting how industry and tourism changed the rural landscape. [End Page 96]
The Effect of Depopulation on Scottish Nature Writing
At the same time that travellers enjoyed pleasure walks through the Highlands and Isles, and to a lesser degree, the Lowlands, Scottish crofters faced forced removal from their lands through evictions, a process known as the clearances.51 Originally meant to increase the land available for commercialised farming, the clearances ultimately created new untouched land for travellers and tourists to explore. Though there were a series of clearances between 1750 and 1860, Blackwood's, Tait's, and other periodicals published in Edinburgh tended to focus on the second phase, which began in 1815 and peaked in the 1850s.52 Opinion pieces varied depending on the writer and the periodical's politics. The traditional Tory standpoint, seen in Blackwood's, posited the clearances as a "great revolution" for "the character of our population."53 This perspective fell in line with Blackwood's promotion of industrial and societal progress through urbanisation, which played to the ideals of its urban readership, a group generally characterised by turns as professional, commercial, and industrial.54 Though much of Tait's readership was from a similar demographic, the periodical's reformist politics led it to depict the crofters as helpless and complacent in the face of their landlords' mismanagement.
Despite Blackwood's and Tait's political differences, they both tended to publish nature writing that painted the peasantry as quaint and "backwards," designating the population as an Other.55 As an Other population being gradually forced from the changing countryside, the peasantry were keepers of a romanticised Scotland through their use of the land and traditions, the latter of which was particularly integral to casting the Scottish landscape in a preternatural light.56 Regardless of whether opinion pieces commended or condemned the clearances, the travel writing published in Blackwood's, Tait's, and other periodicals routinely glorified the peasantry's connection to the past and the landscape.57 Furthermore, the local populations that travellers encountered on their carriage rides or rambles, as a general rule, lost their individualism. To return to the concept of the field, travel writing engaged with the rural peasantry (whose eviction and emigration changed the landscape) as part of the scenery, following in the pattern set by folklore collection and anthropological study; the local people, after all, belonged as much to the unconfined space of study as fossils or birds.58 Consequently, periodicals' descriptions of the areas that crofters once occupied revealed the physical effects on the land, as well as travellers' shifting perceptions of the land, after the 1850s when the clearances reached their height. [End Page 97]
New Forms of Travel Writing
The midcentury shift in landscape narratives that portrayed the Scottish countryside, those who lived there, and the act of travel was also the result of the expanding railway network. As the railway system spread through the Scottish Highlands and across the Lowlands in the second half of the nineteenth century, the middle and working classes had more opportunities for cheap and affordable travel.59 While rambling remained the tertiary form of travel for the romantic traveller, the view on walking for leisure changed. By then, walking for pleasure and the connection to the disappearing countryside transformed almost wholly into a middle- and upper-class activity pushed by a history of romantic ideology and the strengthening tourism industry. However, with travel now accessible to people outside the upper classes, even the titles of published accounts shied away from terms like "tour" or "travels," switching instead to "holiday." These articles recounted shorter trips, such as sporting holidays or spa retreats. Despite the introduction of this new form of nature writing, though, the narratives maintained key aspects of Romanticism as first set in the late eighteenth century: fostering nostalgia and sentimentality and engaging with nature and the national past, a combination that facilitated the mythologisation of the Scottish countryside in nature writing.60 Together, the mythic presentation of the Scottish landscape and the concept that travellers could interact with national culture by venturing into the untamed countryside opened additional options for tourism advertisements.
The turn in the tourism industry came for travellers within Edinburgh, as it had for tourists elsewhere, after Queen Victoria's purchase of the Balmoral Estate in the Highlands in 1852 for "sport."61 Traditional travel writing, which described one traveller's engagement with the surrounding Scottish landscape, still enjoyed popularity among Edinburgh periodicals' readership, but there was also an increase in tourism literature. Writers of hints for holiday rambles, more than those who wrote advice for where to spend the hunting season, utilised literary language, playing upon imagery, tense, and narration. Tourist advertisements, like articles or travel accounts, published in Blackwood's and Tait's were invariably read outside Edinburgh and by foreign tourists visiting the city, but they were also enjoyed by a local readership mainly consisting of the middle class. Frequently, these periodicals promoted the aesthetic of rural communities as much as the physical landscape to attract visitors, as we see in one travel writer's advice for rambles around Glasgow:
When you arrive, the chances are that its beauties are carefully stowed away in a thick mist, or you are drenched to the skin, or you find the hotels full, and [End Page 98] are forced to sleep in an outhouse, or on the heather beneath the soft-burning planets. … On the other hand, [you reach] a little village or clachan, its half-dozen thatched houses set amid blossoming apple-trees; the smoke from all the chimneys, telling of the preparation of the evening meal, floating up into the rose of sunset. A labourer is standing at the door, with a child in his arms; the unharnessed horses are drinking at the trough; and the village boys and girls are busy at their sunset games.62
Blackwood's "Rambles round Glasgow" demonstrates that tourism literature, like other forms of writing, has a narrative, the driving force of which is the landscape. Here, the writer idealises the countryside's simplicity or remoteness, creating an atmosphere of isolation by proposing that the reader may be "forced to sleep in an outhouse" and describing nearby geographical features like the "blooming apple trees" and "rose of sunset."63 With the combined descriptions of physical interactions with nature ("you are drenched to the skin") and allusions to historical folklore ("altar-fires of the Druids"), the writer engages readers with a landscape that is both real and imagined. Moreover, the writer acts as a heterodiegetic narrator throughout the advertisement, so readers experience the scene vicariously through both second-person address and imagery designed to entice them into journeying to the described location.
This is not to say that tourism advertisements were newly formed after 1850; guidebooks and, in conjunction, reviews of guidebooks were available as early as the late eighteenth century.64 But there was an upsurge in the frequency and number of self-contained advertisements published in periodicals, even though nineteenth-century writers on tourism's history disagreed about whether or not this was the case.65 The argument that tourism was entirely new was untrue, as the word itself appeared before 1850 in the same periodicals that claimed otherwise. Tourism has a long history, with travel writers, participants on the Grand Tour, and explorers all fitting the general description of "tourist" that Donald Horne laid out in 1992, where he claimed that the tourist is a modern pilgrim.66 By the mid-nineteenth century, texts targeting tourists appeared with more frequency in periodicals and pocket guides, either as advertisements or tour advice, and the form continued to develop in time with changes in land usage outside Scotland's urban centres. In the latter half of the century, as advertisements for Scottish tourism came to imitate traits found in travel texts, the two converged over the subjects of hunting, whether for deer or grouse, and rambling, which was still a viable leisure activity. Also common in advertisements meant to attract tourists, both domestic and foreign, was an exaggerated emphasis on the "Scottish national character," which played to the collective nostalgia for an imagined past that developed as a part of sociocultural Romanticism and the rise in romantic nationalism.67 [End Page 99]
As a consequence, depictions of nature and the landscape, both real and imagined, blurred the line between tourism advertisements and travel writing. Within the nineteenth century's fledgling tourism industry, early forms of cultural and ecotourism were growing as popular variations. By weaving allusions to history, folklore, and traditional culture into descriptions of the landscape, tourist-targeted texts revealed the genres' overlap. Cultural tourism could not be divorced from the environment, and the environment could not be divorced from its cultural landscape. Though cultural and ecotourism had a well-established history, they were beginning to develop into their modern forms, a process that continued steadily into the twentieth century. As early as 1852, one advertisement describes the tourism scene in Scotland by saying, "Scotland is the land of the picturesque, romantic and poetical; it is visited annually by thousands for purposes of health, pleasure and recreation, and nowhere can the holiday months of summer be passed more agreeably or profitably. Each recurring year the tide of visitors increases in volume, and new accommodation for their reception, and facilities for their transport from place to place, are brought into requisition. Not the least welcome boon to the traveller is an intelligent guide."68 Though short, this analysis of the Scottish tourism industry and advertisement for pocket guidebooks touches upon Scotland's stereotypical virtues and common attractions. Its word choice echoes travel accounts and related articles, seen in descriptors such as "picturesque, romantic and poetical" and, at the end, "legendary."69 It idealises Scotland through an undefined landscape and an equally vague culture. More importantly, it summarises the growing commodification of the Scottish landscape as an increasing number of travellers interacted with the land for purely recreational reasons, drawn out from urban centres by the lure of romanticised spaces. Ultimately, the in-depth landscape descriptions that appeared in mid- to late nineteenth-century nature writing showed the effects of such commodification.
Two noteworthy examples come from the Blackwood's articles "Hints for an Autumnal Ramble" and "Hints for the Vacation Ramble," which, like the earlier "Rambles round Glasgow," spoke to audiences outside the upper classes.70 The author focuses on Shetland and Orkney as worthwhile travel destinations for autumn, which is "the period of the year" to "look northward for sunshine."71 The article is an advice column and an advertisement rather than a story, but the writer treats it as such; the author, who uses the pseudonym "Old Tramp," is as much a heterodiegetic narrator as the travel writer, leading the reader on a hypothetical journey through Shetland and Orkney and using the landscape itself as the vehicle to sketch the narrative. To prove the isles' merits, the writer chronicles the interplay between the land and its dwellers, who are "cut off from [End Page 100] the world," as well as historical and contemporary human-made features, relevant literature, and legends.72 In the less specific "Hints for the Vacation Ramble," published earlier that year, the Old Tramp describes Ben Lomond as a place that is as unnerving as it is scenic. The article explains:
Ben Lomond arises in the mind through the mist of long years spent in the usual cares and vicissitudes of the world, recalls a scene typical of the exhilarating influence of the mountains-top on youthful natures. The ascent is in the opening of spring, while the snow lies deep in the great corrie. Near the top there had been a landslip. From a rock a portion loosened by the frost had broken away, carrying with it a moraine of earth and stones. … A few paces downward in the ascent we observed two objects below—one was a glove, the other a staff, both in their weather-worn aspect suggesting that they had passed the winter where they lay.73
Here, as in "Hints for an Autumnal Ramble," the author layers physical geography with human influence to produce a marked separateness between what is untouched rural landscape and what is urban, regardless of the difference in Edinburgh's distance from each of these places. For the piece about Shetland and Orkney, the writer creates this separateness through the description of "dirt, discomfort, starvation, [and] a rude suspicious peasantry" and a contradictory note referring to the same peasantry as "an intelligent and educated people."74 The weather-worn glove and staff leave a twin effect, as the writer compares them to "a dead body below."75 Though the writer weaves the two for the parallel aim of attracting prospective tourists, the first does so by integrating the local population into the islands' landscape while the second does it with previous travellers' discarded items. By exploiting the local peasantry and discarded paraphernalia for the same ends, the narrator equates a resident population to litter, the trace left behind in the wake of a previous traveller's autumnal ramble. These articles offer an example of how writers conflated the topographical features and human impact upon them to form the landscape.
Conclusion
Throughout the rest of the century, travel writing and tourism advertisements continued to adopt a similar stylistic choice for describing the landscape, one that was also used across genres and academic disciplines. By the end of the century, a new form of periodical landscape narratives emerged, which borrowed not only stylistic choices but also trends in serialised travel writing that offered the reader a vicarious journey through the countryside. These articles described a single area of the Scottish country-side, either through a naturalist lens or as a discussion of the region's [End Page 101] importance to sport or rambling. The external narrator was also farther removed than in either accounts of travel or texts targeting potential tourists. Usually, the narrator maintained present tense and addressed the reader directly, fluctuating between the pronouns "you" and "we" but rarely "I." Rather than depict an individual traveller's topographical experience, the writer led readers through a designated area of the landscape; in effect, the author acted as virtual tour guide. Nonetheless, without the assistance of illustration or photography, the reader's interaction with the landscape occurred through commands such as "look across" and "look down," as well as "picturesque" imagery that often included reference to local folklore.76 Further, the lack of photography as a concrete visual aid resulted in thick descriptions that highlighted the direct effect that human presence had on the land.
Throughout the century, periodical nature writing included more details that evidenced human usage of the land, but it did not stop the mythologisation of the Scottish countryside. Despite discarded items left forgotten on mountainsides and, as one author for Blackwood's wrote, the "streams that have since been polluted by chemical works and manufactories," tourists were, as an article in Tait's stated, flocking to retreats outside the cities, seeking information on the "classical, topographical and legendary" history of the area.77 The political differences between Black-wood's, as a Tory journal, and Tait's, with its focus on reform, influenced the published reactions to urbanisation, the clearances, and related movements, but there was a noticeable similarity in how landscape narratives appeared in these periodicals. In both magazines, the writing styles in different forms of landscape narratives blended into one another, so the late-century articles that led readers through designated regions borrowed from tourist-targeted texts, which borrowed from travel accounts, which often borrowed stylistic choices found in literature or studies of culture and the sciences. Particularly in travel writing, the countryside was presented as an unconfined place of study, where the local communities were as much research subjects as the biological or geological features that surrounded them. The space brought together pedestrianism, travel for leisure, natural science, and ultimately, folklore collection. At the same time, the narrator's personal experience was not often the core of the piece; instead, by leading readers through the landscape with the help of descriptive language, the writer allowed them to experience a vicarious topographical journey. In bringing together a range of literary styles, aspects of field studies, and references to traditional Scottish beliefs, customs, and figures, nineteenth-century periodical nature writing allowed readers to engage with both an otherworldly countryside and a physical one that revealed how the land changed in reaction to a growing tourism industry, human presence, and commodification of resources. [End Page 102]
Sofia Lago is an Adjunct Assistant Professor at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art. She received her PhD in history from the University of Bristol. Her research focuses on the histories of science and the environment as they relate to imperialism and cultural identity-building in the nineteenth century.
NOTES
4. Ibid.
7. For an investigation into the popular press in Scottish cities other than Edinburgh, see Blair, Working Verse in Victorian Scotland, and Donaldson, Popular Literature in Victorian Scotland.
13. Jarrells, "Provincializing Enlightenment," 262.
16. Ibid., 10.
17. For example, an excerpt from Lady M. W. Montagu in the Scots Observer noted from Florence that the "Antinous is entirely naked; all its parts are bigger than nature; but the whole, taken together, and the fine attitude of the figure, carry such an interpretation of ease, elegance, and grace, as no words can describe" ("Additional Volume," 423). Other examples of texts on the Grand Tour include "Week in Florence," "Letter from a Young Gentleman," and "Travels into France and Italy."
20. Ward, "Tours and Detours," 482. The article includes letters from multiple travellers, but this section is attributed to Lucy Ward.
21. Ibid.
22. Ibid.
23. Ibid.
26. For further information on the connection between novel and travel text structure, see Adams, Travel Literature and the Evolution of the Novel.
28. For an example, see "Account of a Tour." The editor indicates in the byline that the account, published in full elsewhere, "contains so much to interest the general reader, that we conceive its insertion may be acceptable" and then ends with "to be continued" (182, 187).
29. See Jarrells, "Provincializing Enlightenment," 262; "Scottish National Character"; Hyde, "Role of 'Our Scottish Readers,'" 139–40; and "Literary and Scientific Society of Edinburgh."
31. See Österlund-Pötzsch, "Bodies in Motion," 254. It largely began with eighteenth-century Swedish scientist Carl Linnaeus, who took his students out into the countryside to study flora and fauna.
33. See Jarvis, Romantic Writing and Pedestrian Travel, 20, and Bagwell, Transport Revolution from 1770, 35–60.
39. Ibid.; "Account of a Tour," 182.
42. Ibid., 156.
43. Ibid., 159.
47. It was not uncommon for folklorists to use others. For an early twentieth-century outline of etiquette for collectors, whether they be the folklorists or the ones they outsourced, see Addy et al., "Collection of Folklore."
51. See MacMillan and Leitch, "Conservation with a Gun," and Ryder, "Sheep and the Clearances in the Scottish Highlands."
56. This concept began with Johann Gottfried von Herder's promotion of scholars of venturing into the German countryside to collect folksongs from the peasants in the 1770s; see Wilson, "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism," 23.
59. This was part of the greater transportation revolution in Britain. For an overview, see Bagwell, Transport Revolution, Hoskins, Making of the English Landscape, and Storrier, Scotland's Life and Society.
62. "Rambles round Glasgow," 475. A similar example is Nilson, "Hints for the Holidays."
65. See the series "Tourists in Scotland before Scott" for an example of one that details a long history of Scottish tourism. Alternatively, see "Rise and Progress of the Scottish Tourist," which goes so far as to claim, "'Tourism' is a new word" (1).
67. See "Scottish National Character." See also Wilson, "Herder, Folklore and Romantic Nationalism," and Bycroft and Hopkins, Folklore and Nationalism in Europe.
69. Ibid.
70. Old Tramp, "Hints for an Autumnal Ramble," 393, and Old Tramp, "Hints for the Vacation Ramble," 170.
72. Ibid., 397.
