15 - Travel writing

Summary

Travel writing is both overture and finale to Mary Shelley's career. Her History of a Six Weeks' Tour (1817), an account of two continental trips co-authored with Percy Bysshe Shelley, marks an exuberant coming of age: it bursts with young love, defiance of parental control, and a search for political meaning. Her pensive Rambles in Germany and Italy (1844) mourns the deaths of her husband and two of her children as well as the loss of her own health, but ultimately comes to terms with those losses, expressing chastened joy at the pleasures that remain: the company of her surviving son, Percy Florence Shelley, and of his friends; the delights of travel; the beauty of mountains and sea, painting and music. Rambles also assesses her political losses and those of a generation of English liberals, whose hopes were raised by the French Revolution but dashed by its terroristic and imperialistic results.

History of a Six Weeks’ Tour sounds a variation of the customary “Grand Tour,” in which young English aristocratic men capped a university education with a two- to three-year journey to France and Italy, accompanied by a tutor. Ostensibly committed to polishing their French and studying Roman antiquities in situ, these young men often pursued sexual adventure as well, while their extended absence displayed, at home, the wealth of their families. Thus, by traveling abroad, the son and his family both acquired what sociologist Pierre Bourdieu calls symbolic capital.1 In the second half of the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour took new, more inclusive, forms: shortened versions affordable by the middle class and continental honeymoons that included women in the ranks of travelers.