Responsible Rural Tourism in Asia: 89 (Aspects of Tourism) - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 184541117X ISBN 13: 9781845411176

Publisher: Channel View Publications, 2024

Synopsis

The rural tourism sector has become a key driver for social and economic growth and a major source of income for developing and low-income countries in many parts of Asia. Rural tourism is progressively viewed as a solution, increasing the economic viability of marginalised areas, stimulating social regeneration and improving the living conditions of rural communities. Responsible rural tourism promotes conservation of the natural environment, protects the authenticity of culture, and offers socioeconomic opportunities and benefits for local communities. This book encompasses case studies from a range of Asian countries and examines both successful and failed attempts in developing responsible rural tourism, and the learnings that we can adopt and adapt for future responsible rural tourism in the region. It will be of interest to students, researchers, stakeholders and policymakers in tourism.

About this title

About the Authors

Vikneswaran Nair is Professor and Dean, Graduate Studies & Research, University of The Bahamas, The Bahamas.

Amran Hamzah is Professor and Director of the Centre for Innovative Planning and Development, Universiti Teknologi Malaysia.

Ghazali Musa is Professor, Faculty of Business and Accountancy, University of Malaya, Malaysia.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Tourists and Travellers

Women's Non-fictional Writing about Scotland, 1770–1830

By Betty Hagglund

Multilingual Matters

Copyright © 2010 Betty Hagglund
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-1-84541-117-6

Contents

Acknowledgments, vii, 
1 Tourists and Travellers: Women's Non-fictional Writing about Scotland 1770–1830, 1, 
2 The Growth of English Tourism in Scotland in the 18th and 19th Centuries, 13, 
3 Travelling to Criticise: A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland, 33, 
4 'Every Thing Worth Seeing': Sarah Murray's Companion and Useful Guide, 54, 
5 Anne Grant of Laggan and the Myth of the Highlands, 77, 
6 From Traveller to Tourist: Dorothy Wordsworth's Two Scottish Tours, 98, 
7 Interrupting the Aesthetic: Sarah Hazlitt's Journal, 126, 
8 Epilogue: From Individual Travel to Mass Tourism, Scotland 1770–1830, 142, 
Appendix 1 Accounts of Travel in Scotland Written by Women during the Period 1740–1830, 145, 
Appendix 2 Guidebooks to Scotland before 1826, 150, 
Appendix 3 Authorship of Journey to the Highlands of Scotland, 155, 
Appendix 4 Dorothy Wordsworth's Reading of Travel Books, 158, 
References, 162, 
Index, 174, 

CHAPTER 1

Tourists and Travellers: Women's Nonfictional Writing about Scotland 1770-1830

In this book, I consider the travels, and the travel and other non-fictional writings, of five women who travelled within Scotland during the late 18th and early 19th century: the anonymous author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland; Sarah Murray (later known as Sarah Aust); Anne Grant of Laggan; Dorothy Wordsworth; and Sarah Hazlitt. During this period, travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically, from a time when there were very few travellers and no provision for those that did come, through to Scotland's emergence as a fully organised tourist destination with the necessary physical and economic infrastructure. Simultaneous with these changes, came changes in writing.

This book, therefore, sets out to explore the changing nature of travel and of travel writing in and about Scotland during the latter years of the 18th century and the early years of the 19th century, focusing specifically on how these five women travelled and represented those travels. These five women were, of course, not the only women to travel in and write about Scotland at this time. Nor do I wish to claim for them a representative role. Each of the women is different; each speaks with her own distinctive voice. Nevertheless, as Tim Youngs has noted:

Travellers do not simply record what they see ... They journey with preconceptions. They observe and write according to established models, having these in mind even when they wish to query or depart from them. No one who travels and writes of their experience can be said to be writing purely as an individual. Descriptions and judgements reveal the values of class, gender, and nationality. (1994: 209) While broadly in agreement with Youngs, I would argue further that the geographical location of the travels may be as influential as the class, gender and nationality of the writer. My discussion is unique to Scotland and to the period 1770–1830. This is not to imply that there are no parallels to be found elsewhere; rather it is to recognise and to emphasise that any discussion of travel writing must take account of the specific historical and geographical factors operating upon the traveller/writer. This assertion is by no means noncontentious, and there are those who have claimed, for example, that women travel writers show 'a similarity of reaction to the foreign environment, despite variations in time and place' (Foster, 1990: 173) (Foster's argument is based on her work on women's travel writings from Italy, America and the Far East). I hope to demonstrate, however, that the writings of the five women considered in this book are all firmly situated in Scotland at a particular time and that this has a direct effect not only on their subject matter, but also on the ways in which they write. I would argue further that, of all literary genres, travel writing is perhaps the most firmly sited in time and space.

In her study of 18th- and 19th-century Scottish women travel writers, Dorothy McMillan wrote:

I take as my starting point that all literature of travel operates between notions of "here" and "there" and the audience for such writing may sometimes be in both places at the same time, just as the writer too may shift positions in significant ways. (1997: 119)

McMillan's statement underlines the complex interplay between audience, writer and geography. Just as the geographic location of the travels affects both the content and the way in which they are written, so too does the geographic and cultural location of the intended audience. Youngs has pointed out that:

Travel writers are at once establishing their cultural affinities with, and spatial, experiential difference from, their readers. Travel writing ... is an expression of identity based on sameness to and yet remoteness from the members of the home society. Moreover, travel writers are able to make "use of this textual, physical and cultural space for an exploration and affirmation or reconstitution of identity". (1994: 3)

A second theme running through this book is an examination of the rhetorical strategies that each of the women uses to represent herself as writer and traveller within her work. Within the broad framework of the changing nature of travel in Scotland, each of these five women writers represented herself and her travels in very different ways. The anonymous author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland defined herself as a 'Sentimental Traveller' in the style of Laurence Sterne. Anne Grant, although born in Glasgow and raised in the American colonies, considered herself 'a true Highlander' and set herself the mission of interpreting (what she saw as) an inarticulate primitive culture to the outside world. Sarah Murray, author of one of the first guidebooks to the Highlands, depicted herself as 'a true lover of nature' whose desire to 'see every thing worth seeing' took precedence over fear of accident or physical discomfort and who, furthermore, could advise her readers authoritatively what to see and how to see it. Sarah Hazlitt, on the other hand, travelled as a tourist, guidebook in hand, following what had by then become a well-worn route. While the author of the Journey, Grant, Murray and Hazlitt travelled and wrote as individuals, Dorothy Wordsworth's travels were an extension of the communal writing life in Grasmere in which she played an integral part, and her travel writings reflect her intimate community.

As mentioned above, quite a number of women travelled in and wrote about Scotland during this period. I applied several selection criteria when choosing writers for this project. Each of the five women travelled in Scotland during the relevant period. Each wrote one or more non-fictional travel accounts – although in the case of Grant, I also look at the ways she depicted the Highlands and the Highlanders in her poetry. A complete and authoritative text was available for all but one of the texts I wanted to discuss, whether published or manuscript. Furthermore, although such a judgment is of necessity subjective, I believe that each of these five women's accounts of Scottish travel is complex and interesting and that, taken together, they provide a useful means of tracing the ways in which Scottish travel and travel writing changed at the end of the 18th and beginning of the 19th century.

The travels of all five women predate the coming of the railways. The changes that the railways brought to travel – in speed, in the development of a mass market and in their effect on the face of the landscape – were profound. Perhaps the most significant difference in post-railway travel was a change in perception. As Wolfgang Schivelbusch has argued, the railway's velocity

blurs all foreground objects, which means that there no longer is a foreground – exactly the range in which most of the experience of pre-industrial travel was located. The foreground enabled the traveler to relate to the landscape through which he was moving. He saw himself as part of the foreground, and that perception joined him to the landscape. ... Now velocity dissolved the foreground, and the traveler lost that aspect. (1986: 61, 63. See also Sternberger, 1977, Chapter 2)

Although, by the end of my time period, improvements in transport technology were already starting to distance travellers from what they were seeing – Lady Wilson and her party viewed waterfalls from the comfort of their coach (Bant, 1804-1816) and Sarah Hazlitt travelled by steamboat (although much of her tour was taken on foot) – the changes in perception wrought by the coming of the railways were far more extreme and lie outside the limits of this study.

Three of the texts considered, one by Hazlitt and two by Wordsworth, are diaries that remained unpublished during their authors' lifetimes. In contrast, Sarah Murray's trip was taken deliberately to gather material for the writing of a guidebook, which, she hoped, would be far superior to any previously published. The anonymous author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland claimed that the letters that comprise the Journey were 'selected from a correspondence, begun, continued, and completed, upon motives of amusement, invitation, and tenderness' (1777: v). It is important to note the word 'selected' – this book is a consciously shaped verbal construct, prepared for the wider public. The same is true of Anne Grant's Letters from the Mountains. Like those in the Journey, the letters that make up Grant's three-volume text (together with those she published later) were selected, edited and shaped, and that process was continued in the substantial changes she made to subsequent editions.

While both Wordsworth's and Hazlitt's travel writings are in manuscript diary form, it may only be the Hazlitt diary – a record that combines discussion of Scottish travel with a recording of the events surrounding her divorce proceedings – which can be considered a 'private' diary. Although, in the end, Wordsworth did not publish either of her Scottish travel accounts, she certainly spent a considerable period of time revising the first account in preparation for publication. The fact that the 1803 journal survives in multiple copies in several different hands also points to its existence as, at least, a quasi-public document, and evidence exists that her account of her second Scottish journey was also circulated among family and friends.

It is often claimed that diaries and letters have historically been 'women's genres', enabling women to write while avoiding the criticism that, it is said, would result if they were to publish more 'literary' texts. Critics such as Linda Anderson have argued that the published diary offered:

the possibility of laying claim to writing while allaying the anxieties of actual publication ... the diary for many [women] writers can be regarded as a symptom of restriction, giving a provisional voice to women who were denied confident access to public expression. (Anderson, 1987: 60–61)

Other critics have suggested that the fragmented and discontinuous forms of diaries and letters replicate the fragmented forms of women's lives or draw analogies between form in writing and household pursuits:

It is clear that they lavished upon writing [their diaries] the same care for detail and pleasure in design we see and hear of in dressmaking, embroidery, quilting, darning and mending, baking, preserving, arranging houses and gardening. (Hampsten, 1982: 80)

Tempting though these analyses may be, they apply far more convincingly to later periods than they do to the 18th or early 19th centuries. An investigation into American journal writing has shown that American men kept journals in numbers far exceeding those kept by women until well past the middle of the 19th century, and that it was not until the 20th century that the diary came to be a form of writing practiced predominantly by women writers (Culley, 1985: 3). While I am unaware of any comparable statistical studies of British journal writing, I see no reason to assume that the results would differ greatly. (The caveat applies, of course, that any study of early diaries reflects survival rates rather than actual numbers written.) Furthermore, the assumption that diaries were private documents to be kept hidden from others' eyes is relatively recent. Many 18th- and 19th-century diaries were semi-public documents intended to be read by an audience, and this was particularly true of travel diaries. It was not uncommon to entertain one's friends on a winter evening by reading aloud to them from the travel journals written during the previous summer's trips and diarists frequently made fair copies of their travel journals for circulation among family and friends.

Many of the same problems arise in relation to the defining of letters as 'low-status' or 'private' texts. This, as Margaret Ezell has shown,

is very much the product of nineteenth- and twentieth-century experiences. For example, the whole concept of a "letter" was different in the seventeenth century than in the nineteenth century. Letters were an established literary form in the Renaissance and seventeenth century and were not "private" in the sense of personal domestic correspondence. They were highly conventional public forms of address, "epistles" on weighty matters written to display the author's rhetorical graces and intended to be circulated. ... Rather than being a despised literary form, the letter as a genre commanded much attention and respect. (1993: 35)

Although Ezell is speaking particularly of the 17th century, letters and epistles remained a respectable and valued genre through the 18th century. Similarly, analyses of women's travel writing have sometimes classified travel writing as a 'low-status' genre; again, I would argue that this classification should not be applied to the period under discussion.

I have referred above to the rapid changes in travel and tourism in Scotland that took place during the 18th and early 19th centuries. Attempting to explain a similar process in England, Ian Ousby wrote that 'movements in taste have led to patterns of travel ... these patterns of travel have in turn been expanded and systematised into a tourist industry'. He goes on to say:

By taste, which provides the initial cue, I mean the application of general tendencies of thought and cultural attitude to the act of judging one aspect of our environment as interesting, beautiful or otherwise worth attention and rejecting others as not. Travel quickly converts these judgements into practical, local and specific terms. In doing so, it creates a habit of vision and a corresponding habit of blindness ... getting to know a region ... increasingly becomes a matter of appreciating particular sights from a particular angle. Tourism completes the process by turning the habits of travel into a formal codification which exerts mass influence and gains mass acceptance. (1990: 5)

Over the last 40 years, much academic attention has been devoted to an attempt to distinguish between travellers and tourists. The distinction is frequently value-laden. To be a 'traveller' is good; to be a 'tourist', bad. The negative connotation of the term tourist is not a new one. In the 1780s and 1790s, the term could still be used in the neutral sense of 'one who makes a tour'. The Oxford English Dictionary quotes Samuel Pegge's 1800 Anecdotes of the English Language: 'A Traveller is now-a-days called a Tour-ist', and the Honourable John Byng (1781–1794/1934–1938: II, 171) was happy to describe himself as a 'tourist', even boasting that 'the only people who become acquainted with counties, are tourists'. At the same time, however, the term was increasingly used in a derogatory way. 'These Tourists, Heaven preserve us!' began Wordsworth's 1799 poem, 'The Brothers', going on to refer to 'that moping Son of Idleness' (William Wordsworth, 1984:155–156); while William Marshall, in 1808, referred to 'a mere tourist' who 'may catch certain facts which pass under his eye' (quoted in Barrell, 1972: 86). Already the idea of a tourist as someone with only a superficial sense of passing sights and impressions was gaining currency.

For Paul Fussell, writing in 1980, travel was 'hardly possible anymore' and 'tourism is all we have left' (37, 41). Fussell asserted that it was possible to distinguish 'exploration' from 'travel' from 'tourism', claiming that 'the explorer seeks the undiscovered, the traveller that which has been discovered by the mind working in history, the tourist that which has been discovered by entrepreneurship and prepared for him by the arts of mass publicity' (39). An even harsher view was taken by Daniel Boorstin (1961: 79, 85), who described the modern tourist as 'filling his experience with pseudo-events' in a world where 'travel has ceased to be an activity - an experience, an undertaking – and [has] instead become a commodity'.

As James Buzard pointed out in his 1993 analysis of 19th- and early 20th-century tourism, however, critics such as Fussell and Boorstin 'tend to repeat, rather than investigate, the customary denigration of the touristic', making assumptions that are 'themselves the product of nearly two hundred years' concerted cultural stereotyping' (3). Furthermore, such critics frequently rely on inadequate and inaccurate historical descriptions, in which a golden age of travel is followed by a degraded one of tourism, an analysis which is historically incorrect.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Tourists and Travellers by Betty Hagglund. Copyright © 2010 Betty Hagglund. Excerpted by permission of Multilingual Matters.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Channel View Publications
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 184541117X
• ISBN 13: 9781845411176
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 248
• Editor: Nair Vikneswaran, Hamzah Amran, Musa Ghazali