41 - Home Tour

Summary

‘Home’ was not a term dealt with by Raymond Williams, yet it finds a place in New Keywords, and is there defined as evoking ‘both rest and settlement, and movement’ (Bennett 2005, 162). As Rune Graulund writes in this volume, our understanding of what it means to travel is fundamentally shaped by our conception of home; the ‘home tour’, a term used to describe journeys made by travellers within their own nation or locality, epitomizes that close relationship. Home tour travel is sometimes referred to as ‘domestic’ travel, distinguishing it from other kinds of trans-border international travel in the same way that airports distinguish between domestic and international flights. The terms ‘home tour’ and ‘domestic travel’ can be misleading, however, as they suggest a familiarity that is often belied by the journeys themselves. Travellers can and do experience foreignness and defamiliarization on the home tour.

The term ‘home tour’ is perhaps most commonly used to describe journeys made by British travellers within Britain, and the writings they produced have been the subject of a number of critical studies (many of which build upon the early work of Moir 1964; Andrews 1989; and Ousby 1990). Benjamin Colbert (2012, 2) writes that British home tourism ‘dates back at least to religious pilgrimage’, and Chaucer's (1987, line 26) eclectic group of pilgrims, travelling in ‘felaweshipe’ in the late fourteenth-century Canterbury Tales, remind us of the early relationship between home tour circuits and devotional itineraries (see pilgrimage). Andrew McRae (2009, 2) has argued that home tour travel was ‘problematic’ in the early modern period because ‘human mobility, within the space of the English nation, posed fundamental challenges to the period's predominant models of social order’. By travelling through their nation, individuals found their relationship to that larger imagined community changed (see Anderson 1991, 6). Wendy Bracewell (2016, 345) has discussed nineteenth-century home tour travel's concern with substantiating nationhood, but it could be argued that the attempts to use travel writing to ‘fix’ a ‘national spirit’ began much earlier. In the late seventeenth century, Celia Fiennes (1947, 1–2) celebrated the home tour as an act of patriotism that would ‘cure the evil itch of over-valuing foreign parts’.