Tourists and Travellers

Book excerpt: During the late 18th and early 19th centuries, travel and tourism in Scotland changed radically, from a time when there were very few travellers and no provision for those that there were, through to Scotland’s emergence as a fully fledged tourist destination with the necessary physical and economic infrastructure. As the experience of travelling in Scotland changed, so too did the ways in which travellers wrote about their experiences. Tourists and Travellers explores the changing nature of travel and of travel writing in and about Scotland, focusing on the writings of five women - Sarah Murray, Anne Grant, Dorothy Wordsworth, Sarah Hazlitt and the anonymous female author of A Journey to the Highlands of Scotland. It further examines the specific ways in which those women represented themselves and their travels and looks at the relationship of gender to travel writing, relating that to issues of production and reception as well as to questions of discourse.