In this paper I consider a range of some of the most popular and widely-read travel accounts from... more In this paper I consider a range of some of the most popular and widely-read travel accounts from male and female travellers to Italy, from the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. I argue that the 1820s was key to the growing importance of domestic ‘virtue’ in Britain’s understanding of itself as a nation, in terms of civic and political stability at home, and national ‘superiority’ abroad. Travel writing was an essential part of this process. Ideas at home were reflected and reinforced by British middle-class travellers’ changing observations of Italian domesticity in the same period. Travel-writing was a particularly popular genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, widely reviewed by periodicals and journals, and ‘outrun in popularity among the reading public only by theology’. Travellers’ accounts were therefore an influential medium for reflecting and propagating popular themes and ideas and a useful tool to analyse a ‘broad range of cultural, political and historical debates’.
In this paper I consider a range of some of the most popular and widely-read travel accounts from... more In this paper I consider a range of some of the most popular and widely-read travel accounts from male and female travellers to Italy, from the late-eighteenth to the early-nineteenth centuries. I argue that the 1820s was key to the growing importance of domestic ‘virtue’ in Britain’s understanding of itself as a nation, in terms of civic and political stability at home, and national ‘superiority’ abroad. Travel writing was an essential part of this process. Ideas at home were reflected and reinforced by British middle-class travellers’ changing observations of Italian domesticity in the same period. Travel-writing was a particularly popular genre in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, widely reviewed by periodicals and journals, and ‘outrun in popularity among the reading public only by theology’. Travellers’ accounts were therefore an influential medium for reflecting and propagating popular themes and ideas and a useful tool to analyse a ‘broad range of cultural, political and historical debates’.
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Papers by David Robinson