<i>Andrew McRae</i>, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England<i>Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England</i>. Andrew McRae. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+247.

Previous articleNext article FreeAndrew McRae, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England. Andrew McRae. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2009. Pp. xi+247.Glenn ClarkGlenn ClarkUniversity of Manitoba Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditEmailQR Code SectionsMoreAndrew McRae’s Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England is an ambitious and vibrant book. Its reach exceeds its grasp, but even so it offers an important vision of the early modern English culture of popular mobility. Through examination of a remarkably wide variety of texts McRae’s book seeks to demonstrate how “mobility lent shape to some of the definitive transformations of the era: from the shift towards capitalism, through the ongoing spatial redistribution of the population, to the political reconceptualization of passive subjects as active citizens” (7). At the same time, it wants to show that “the formation of the modern English nation” was linked to enhanced toleration of mobility (7). McRae builds his analysis on the work of scholars and theorists of mobility, nation, and space, including Jean-Christophe Agnew, Richard Helgerson, Patricia Fumerton, Henri Lefebvre, and Michel de Certeau. The central claim is that popular mobility ultimately destabilized early modern orthodoxies of geographical and social placement, opening national space to the creative and commercial imagination of the liberal subject.The book is composed of two multichapter parts. The first, “Routes,” begins with a lengthy and intricately structured chapter on rivers and their literature. McRae argues that the “reflections on mobility” in the discourse of rivers are “commonly uncertain and fraught” (22), an ambivalence contextualized in terms of the contested politics of schemes for river improvement. William Harrison’s “Description of Britain” (1577 and 1586), Christopher Saxton’s Atlas (1580), Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (1590–96), and Michael Drayton’s Poly-Olbion (1612–22)—among other texts—are shown both to resist and promote mobility. The watermen’s poetry of John Byshop and John Taylor critiques “discourses of localized identities” and asserts “a national space defined by mobility” with more assurance (46). The final pages turn to the river passages of country house poems in order to demonstrate their ambivalence in the face of changing visions of property and free circulation of goods and people.The second chapter is as wide-ranging as the first. It examines contrasts between traditionalist visions of local settlement and the attempts to legitimize popular mobility in discourses on roads. Its first section is about road “networks,” a term becoming familiar in globalization studies; the second section is about representations of mobile commoners using those networks. The chapter includes an examination of the way in which travel itineraries such as John Ogilby’s Britannia (1675) extend older visions of road networks, along with a discussion of Daniel Defoe’s vision for the improvement of national networks through regularization. McRae further argues that rogue and pedlar pamphlets gradually begin to represent the meaningfulness and legitimacy of common mobility. Such meaningful mobility is even more apparent, McRae suggests, in nonconformist spiritual autobiographies and in John Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678–84), which develop “the equation of physical and spiritual mobility” (113). The final chapter of part 1 attends to texts that reveal anxiety about the role of inns and alehouses in arterial networks. Some attention to character- and jest-books precedes examination of several plays, particularly Ben Jonson’s The New Inn (1629). While the chapter emphasizes the ways in which these texts expose “threats…to hierarchy and difference” (128), it also attempts to demonstrate that the plays’ actions and characterizations exceed their conservative form, allowing to inns and alehouses “a vitality that is almost impossible to quell” (134).The second part, called “Travellers,” begins with a chapter on progresses. It argues that while Elizabethan and Jacobean royal progresses assert the principle of the monarch’s uncontested power over all the places of the nation, the texts of progresses and entertainments, along with more popular appropriations of the genre, reveal ways in which subjects asserted their own interests in property and mobility. The chapter concludes with an examination of the wanderings of King Charles during the civil war. McRae suggests that the geographical and social displacement of the king facilitated a “dispersal of political interaction across the nation” constitutive of citizenship within a public sphere (173). The fifth chapter describes the enhanced confidence of domestic tourists in the seventeenth century. It demonstrates the gradual and difficult liberation of curiosity in elite journey poems that respond to the rise of empiricism, as well as the activation of new standards of political, economic, and aesthetic value in travelers’ journals. The chapter ends with a fascinating discussion of the journals of Celia Fiennes, who used her cross-country journeys between 1685 and circa 1712 to legitimize female mobility in terms of the novel values emphasized in domestic travel writing. The final full chapter offers what is for this book an unusually lengthy and detailed analysis of John Taylor’s idiosyncratic travel pamphlets. The thesis is that Taylor experiences commercialized travel, or traffic, as dignified industry and makes of such traffic the condition of his authorial persona. The book concludes with an epilogue on Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–26), which, McRae suggests, appears less constrained by debates on mobility than its seventeenth-century predecessors. Defoe imagines that his own mobility reflects the “purposeful and dynamic” domestic circulation of people and goods in a nation unconstrained by barriers to common movement (241).McRae’s prose is clear and jargon free. His attention to the impact on literary form of conflicts between orthodox and emergent perceptions of place and mobility generates some fresh and energetic readings. The book’s interest in the developing perception of the ethical meaningfulness of mobility, and, more generally, its assessment of mobility as a condition of the rise of the liberal subject within a sphere of liberated transactions, are compelling. The book helps substantiate Jean-Christophe Agnew’s argument in Worlds Apart: The Market and the Theatre in Anglo-American Thought, 1550–1750 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1986) for the growing sense of ubiquitous market space in early modern England. The nine illustrations are a valuable addition to Literature and Domestic Travel, though details on maps are, unsurprisingly, too small to read without magnification.A consequence of McRae’s decision to reveal travel’s challenge to placement within such a wide variety of texts is that the analyses of those texts are always brief, sometimes frustratingly so. McRae acknowledges that his purpose is “to appreciate a culture rather than a literary canon” (13), which is fair enough. Nonetheless, readers will notice that detailed demonstrations of claims about texts are often missing. The author’s own acknowledgment that his narrative “veers” through its discussions is no exaggeration (13). Apart from the chapter on John Taylor’s pamphlets, the lengthiest textual analyses—of Jonson’s The New Inn and of Fiennes’s journals—are each only nine pages long. Many important texts are dealt with in a paragraph. To be fair, this is more a complaint about a critical strategy—one perhaps too easily accepted as unproblematic—than about McRae’s execution of that strategy.However, a specific problem with the book’s strategy of accelerated analysis becomes visible in its attempt to describe the impact of discourses of popular mobility on the representation of English nationhood. McRae takes the concept of “nation” as an easy given; it is presented as a kind of preexistent political form whose nature “is significantly transformed” as moving citizens “bring networks into being” (68). This gesture toward a definition of modern nation space is developed no further, though McRae continues to assert the implicit nationalism of various discourses of mobility. Early on, McRae seems to suggest that the English nation is brought “into being” in conflicts over mobility (7). On the next page, however, he writes that the traditional model of England against which mobility militates is one in which “the nation was organized into stable and relatively self-sufficient communities.” The author does not appear to notice the contradiction between the claim that the nation comes into being and the claim that the nation is already in being. It is the latter view that dominates the book, but it is hard to feel confident that it should. The textual evidence presented almost never actually speaks of England in national terms. Nothing in McRae’s argument explains how the networked space of the mobile subject is more clearly national, or more clearly distinct as English space in the minds of its citizens, than English space in any earlier historical period. It may be that the nation is coming into being out of land, kingdom, or commonwealth, or it might be that land, kingdom, or commonwealth is changing without yet becoming nation. This incompletely historicized perspective is surprising in a book that cites Helgerson’s Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan Writing of England (University of Chicago Press, 1992). What is safe to say is that over the course of the early modern period, the English sense of domestic place becomes, as McRae writes, “something bigger than a local community” (200). 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