Chapter 8 - ‘Such Classic Ground’

Summary

8. Pam Perkins’s essay, ‘“Such Classic Ground”: Women and the Romantic-Era Scottish Tour’ addresses the subject of tours in Scotland and explores the way in which domestic travel potentially offered tourists an encounter with scenes that could be deemed ‘classic’ owing to their cultural resonance. Rather than declare any enthusiasm for the work of the enormously influential Scott, however, Anne Grant of Laggan in Letters from the Mountains (1806) presented Highland tourism as providing access to a Scotland which she aligned with the classical Greece of Homer and the Ossianic epics of James Macpherson; after returning to Scotland from America at the age of seventeen, Grant fashioned herself as a cultural insider and argued that a knowledge of Gaelic was a prerequisite for full appreciation of Highland landscape and culture. Perkins goes on to discuss Elizabeth Spence and Eliza Fletcher as figures who, though they showed little interest in Homeric or Ossianic associations, nonetheless suggested in a similar fashion to Grant that the Highland tour could function as the socially exclusive continental Grand Tour did for elite men, as a form of improving cultural education.