Chapter 7 - Experimental Tourism

Summary

7. Ian Duncan’s ‘Experimental Tourism: Aesthetics, Science, and World History in the Highlands’ focuses on Scottish tour literature written as the Highlands were forcibly integrated into the British state and capitalist economy, and as a dialectic of ‘improvement and romance’ (in Womack’s phrase) produced cleared and depopulated regions as tourist destinations. He contrasts Dorothy Wordsworth’s Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland with Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Isles of Scotland, arguing that the former – against Johnson’s sense of a ‘desertified’ landscape – responds to the Highlands as a theatre of the sublime even as it also acknowledges the displacement of Highlanders themselves. As Duncan shows, Highland tourism generated imaginative engagement with the new science of geology as well as providing a stimulus for conjectural history and literary innovation. He concludes by reading Walter Scott’s poetic romance The Lady of the Lake as staging a discovery of Scotland according to which the Trossachs offer a portal through which larger world-historical forces, both natural and human, may be apprehended.