11 - Moving: Sarah Murray and her TravellingReaders

Summary

Penny Fielding has identified the 1790s and early 1800sas a period of transition in Scottish travelliterature. This was when the early explorations ofThomas Pennant and others gave way to an era of‘wholesale tourism’. This pattern can certainly beseen in the Edinburgh booksellers’ sales of Scottishtravel books, with Sarah Murray's Companion and Useful Guide to theBeauties of Scotland a useful example. Itwas first published in 1799, with new and updatedvolumes and editions in 1803, 1805 and 1810. Thebooks were based on a series of varyingly intrepidjourneys that Murray undertook in the ScottishHighlands and Islands between 1796 and 1803, andthey were designed to facilitate the reader'smobility. The booksellers’ accounts provide aninsight into Murray's engagement with the world ofcommercial publishing, and this chapter explores howher travels and her career as a travel writer wereshaped by her class and gender, particularly when itcame to the business of bringing a book to market inEdinburgh. The chapter also explores evidence fromthe booksellers’ records indicating that Murray was– through key decisions about the book's productionand marketing – successful in meeting an increasingconsumer demand for explicitly instructionalguidebooks, especially among women, who weretravelling in Scotland in greater numbers duringthis period.

But this chapter seeks to challenge rather thanreinforce a long tradition of identifying maletravellers as heroic ‘explorers’ as opposed to womenwho went on ‘pleasure tours’. As Pam Perkins pointsout, ‘Far from being belated or passive followers ofmore adventurous men the many women who wrote orappeared in late eighteenth-century narratives ofScottish tours played a significant role in thedevelopment of modern concepts of travel andtourism.’, Instead, the focus here is on the ways inwhich Murray presented herself as a solitary,courageous traveller, as well as her pioneering ofthe instructional guidebook format. She was anexpert when it came to ‘moving’ books (i.e., insuccessfully bringing them to market and ensuringthat they shifted off booksellers’ shelves) thatwere designed to aid movement. In focusing on howher work facilitated other travellers’ travels, thischapter asks how this kind of guidebook changed thepractices and wider social implications of women'smobility at the start of the nineteenth century inScotland.