ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING

Judith Adler

Abstract: Sightseeing has not always held its present pride of place in travel ritual. Thesenses have received differing kinds of attention from codifiers of travel conventions.Between 1600 and 1800, treatises on travel method shifted from a scholastic focus upontouring as an opportunity for discourse, to enthusiasm for travel as "eyewitness"observation. In the course of this shift in attention from the traveler's ear and tongue tothe traveler's eye, many of the conventions of sightseeing performance were firstdeveloped. The historical "visualization" of travel experience is to be understood inrelation to cultural and social features of the period.

INTRODUCTION Even a brief perusal of travel literature, or short look at contempo­rary tourists, is sufficient to suggest that travel practices might be conveniently groupedaccording to style. The conventions which, at various times, have governed the artfulperformance ofjourneys include norms pertinent to ritual preparation; modes oftransportation; duration; design and pattern of itinerary; foci of attention; dress, demeanor, and social relationships to be maintained en route; and forms of discoursemarking termination. The list, meant only to be suggestive, far from exhausts all possiblecategories of convention. The relative emphasi given anyone category can be expected tovary; indeed, this variation often helps to define the distinctiveness of a travel style. Butall travel conventions bear upon human movement through culturally conceived space,movement which is deliberately undertaken in order to yield meaning ertinent to thetravelers and their publics.Judith Adler is Associate Professor of Sociology at Memorial University ofNew­foundland (St. John's, Newfoundland, Canada AlC 5S7). Her publications include Artistsin Off;s (1977), "Youth on the Road," Annals of Tourism Research (1985) and "Travel asPerformed Art :' American Journal ofSocioloQ (1989). Sh e is presently completing abook entitled Tourism Obserued.

7 age 2 8 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING Space and time- and the traveler's own body asit moves through both-are the baseline elements ofall travel performance. This paperexplores one dimension of the human "embodiment" of the travel art. It has never beenirrelevant whether a traveler set out in a male or female body, and for centuries moraltreatises warned of the dangers which travel posed to women (Giles 1976). Age andhealth have also drawn attention, early treatises often setting an ideal age for tour- ing,while interdicting it to those whose bodies were too young, too old, or too infirm to bearout the desired experience (Barretti 1768; Bourne 1578; Leigh 1671; Turler 1575). Butone may further argue that even beyond such classifications, the traveler's body, as theliteral vehicle ofthe travel art, has been subject to historical construction and stylisticconstraint. The very senses through which the traveler receives cultur- ally valuedexperience have been molded by differing degrees of cultiva- tion and, indeed, discipline.In examining the link between a particular style of travel that flourished in theseventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries and a historically new, overweaning emphasisupon the isolated exercise and systematic cultivation of the sense of sight, the concern of

this paper is twofold. It attempts to suggest that the way in which the human body isexercised as an instrument of travel is deeply revealing of the historically shifting mannerin which people conceive themselves and the world to which they seek an appropriaterelation through travel ritual. More specifically, it urges that the strong present linkbetween tourism and sightseeing should not be taken for granted or regarded as static innature. For not only is sight just one of several sense modalities around which styles oftravel have been elaborated, but sight itself has been differently conceived in the courseof tourism history. In a convention ofWestern tourism which has become so taken forgranted that it risks passing without remark, it is often said that people travel to "see" theworld, and assumed that travel knowledge is substantially gained through observation.This longstanding association between travel and vision, tourism and sightseeing,demands closer scrutiny. It has not always existed, has undergone importantmodifications even for its duration, and its history offers intriguing glimpses into earlierphases of Western epistemology and subjectivity. The practices of the contemporarysightseer, so often caricatured with his camera in tow, must ultimately be understood inrelation to the historical develop- ment (and eventual popularization) of post-Baconianand Lockeian orientations toward the problem of attaining, and authoritatively repre­senting, knowledge. They must be seen in relation to forms of subjec- tivity anchored inwillfully independent vision, and in the cognitive subjugation of a world of«things."Above all, they need to be under- stood in relation to that Eurpoean culturaltransformation which Lu- cien Febvre first termed "the visualization ofperception"(Febvre 1947: 473; Mandrou 1961:68-77).

TRAVEL AS DISCOURSE Travel was first widely proclaimed as an art, and openlysecular forms of tourism were first systematically racticed by European elites age 3JUDITH ADLER 9 in the early sixteenth century. One need only turn to the treatises ontravel method produced during a period which was preoccupied with the problem of"method" in all branches of learning to find evidence that sightseeing did not alwaysenjoy its later pride ofplace. The travel- ers these treatises addressed, scholar-courtiersand young aristocrats reparing for diplomatic and legal careers, went abroad seekingeduca- tional experience at universities in Paris, Bologna, or Padua, as well asopportunities to engage the services of Europe's foremost dancing, mu- sic, fencing, orriding masters with whom they would be forced to speak in a foreign tongue. Booksplayed a prominent art in the preparation for a journey and their purchase was one of itsobjects. The aristocratic traveler who was addressed, often by his tutor, in early manualsof advice, went abroad for discourse rather than for picturesque views or scenes. The artof travel he was urged to cultivate was in large measure one of discoursing with the livingand the dead -learning foreign tongues, obtaining access to foreign courts, and conversinggracefully with eminent men, assimilating classical texts appropriate to particular sites,and, not least, speaking eloquently upon his return. At a time when the social role of thenobility was being transformed and bur- geoning institutions of diplomacy opened newopportunities in a cour- tier's career (Mattingly 1955:211), European aristocraciessustained an art of travel, explicitly legitimized by service to the state, which sought todevelop the international contacts, judicious olitical judgement, adeptness at foreignlanguages, and skill in oratory deemed desirable in a Prince's counselor. The experienceof the world at which this art aimed, was understood to involve primarily a reflective and

disciplined exercise of the ear and the tongue. Advice to "confer with expert men andwith many," to go a hundred miles out of one's way to speak with a wise man, rather thanfive to see a fair town, and to be neither credulous nor overly eager to contradict when inconference was reiterated in one early travel sermon after another (Essex 1596:13). Manytravelers carried with them a book of blank pages, an Album Amicorum, with which theywould call upon men of reputation, begging them to inscribe some words (Hazard1953:6). The young Earle of Bedford is lectured by his tutor, J. Spradling: Everie one cangaze, can wander, and can wonder, but to few it is given to seek, to search, to leame, andto attaine to true policie and wisdome (which is traveling indeed) Now this search andinquisi- tion I speake of is to be practiced either by reading the several1 histo- ries ofthose nations where you are to travel1 or else by hearing.Therefore to attaine to a moreexact and perfect knowledge it shall not be amiss for your Lordship to talk with thelearned of the lande where you go. For albeit wisdome and safetie do wish to counsel youto silence in travelling: yet I thinke it not amiss, though you give the rains now and thento that unbridled member, the toong: which you may use as occasion shall serve (Lipsius1592:A4). And might I have leave to direct you also in the subject of your talke, in mineopinion nothing were more meet for one ofyour honor- able estate then to question anddiscourse of the fashions, lawes, nobilitie, and kind of warfare of the people where youtravell (Lipsius 1592:B2). age 410 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING Elaborating furtherupon the advantages to be gained through "confer- ring with the wise," the tutor affirmsthat mere contact with eloquence "will make a man much more rhetoricall and civil inspeech:' and concludes by anchoring his travel program in hwnan anatomy, "Leam- ing .is obtained either by the eare, or by the eie: by hearing (I meane) or by reading" (Lipsiusl592:B3). Both senses are given equal weight, but, far more tellingly, sight is exclusivelyequated with read- ing, or at best with the confirmation of classical texts. For in traveling,a man "shall have occasion to call into remembrance that which is set down in Livy,Polibius, Tacitus, etc. [and] see before his eies the trueth of their discourses and thedemonstration of their descriptions" (Lipsius 1959:XC). The word, not the image, the earand the tongue, not the eye, stand at the center of such treatment. Any sightseeing whichtakes place remains at the service of textual authority. reparation for travel in- volvedgathering information at home for exchange abroad, learning foreign languages,compiling systematic lists of questions, obtaining the letters of introduction necessary foraccess to high status settings ofconversation, and, above all, reading. Still in thistradition, Richard Lassells' An Italian L@mp (1697) fea- tures travel as a means ofundoing the curse ofBabel and restoring universal discourse. [It] takes off in some sortthat aboriginal curse which was laid upon mankind the confusion of tongues. [or]diversity of language [which] makes the wisest man pass for a fool in a strange country,and the best man for an excommunicated erson, whose conversation all men avoid. Nowtraveling takes off this curse and this moral excom- munication by making us learn manylanguages and converse freely with people in other countries" (Lassells 1697). Similarly:It contents the mind with the rare discourses we hear from learned men. It makes him [thetraveler] sought after by his betters, and listened unto with admiration by his inferiors. Itmakes him sit still in his old age with satisfaction; and travel over the world again in hischair and bed by discourse and thoughts In line it's an excellent Commentary uponhistories; aild no man understands Livy and Ce- sar, Guicciardin and Monluc, like himwho hath made exactly the Grand Tour ofFrance and the giro ofItaly" (Lassells 1697).

I.

For Lassells, a Catholic tutor, the world figures metaphorically as a book after the mannerof Plotinus and Augustine, and travel through it is treated as a commentary upon othertexts. In a formulation to be repeated by other writers until the end of the nineteenthcentury, he writes, "They that never stir from home read only one page of this book; and,like the dull fellow who could never learn to count farther than five dwell always uponone lesson." Conversation with emi- nent men, assiduously sought out abroad, becomes aprime technique for "reading" the world, and in old age the traveler can hope to "travelover again" - not, it is worth noting, through a store ofpretty scenes age 5 JUDITHADLER 11 which have been squirreled away in memory, but through thoughts anddiscourse. THE ASCENDANCY OF THE EYE OVER THE EAR The notion of travel asan exercise in universalizing discourse, ar- ticularly fitting to scholastic notions ofhowknowledge was to be sought, endured for a long time. But it was increasingly overlapped,and eventually eclipsed, by another tradition, which gave preeminence to the "eye" and tosilent "observation." To a modem reader, one ofthe most anomalous features of sixteenthand seventeenth century travel sermons is the consistency with which they digress intohuman anato- my, rhetorically arguing the superiority of the eye over the ear. Withinevitable juridical reference, travel is praised through a favorable con- trast between"eyewitness" and "hearsay" as legally admissible evidence and ground for validjudgement. Auricular knowledge and discourse, identified with traditional authority,Aristotelianism and the School- men, are devalued in favor of an "eye" believed to yielddirect, unme- diated, and personally verified experience. The shift accompanies a newnaturalistic orientation, and attains its purest expression in the seventeenth century whenit is nurtured by a fashion in courtly circles for Natural Philosophy and anepistemological individualism which enjoins every man to "see," verify, and, in a sense,"create" the world anew for himself. R. Dallington opens A Method for Eavell: shewedby taking tJ2e view of France as it Stoode in the yeare ofour Lord 1598 with arecommendation of both discourse and observation: lato thought nothing better for thebettering of our understand- ing than travels as well by having a conference with thewiser sort in all sorts·of learning as by the eye-sight of those things which otherwise aman cannot have but by tradition: a sandy foundation either in matter of science orconscience, (Dallington 1605: 1). Dallington goes on to recommend that the travelercarry no books with him, but only: the papers of his own observation, especially aGiomale wherein from day to day he shall set down [whatever] his eye meeteth by theway remarquable. Even more significant, like other seventeenth century English Protes­tants who urged travelers to take protective measures against Continen- tal Catholicismand its "infection of errors," Dallington warns against auricular openness. The nextcaveat is, to beware how he heare anything repugnant to his religion; for as I have tyedhis tongue, so must I slop his eares, lest they be open to the smooth incantations of aninsinuating seducer, or the suttle arguments of a sophistical adversarie (Dallington 1605:1-2). age 6 12 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING In a contemporaneous sermon, Quo Wadis?A Just Censure ofEavell as it is commonly undertukzn by the gentlemen of our Nation,Joseph Hall warns against the spiritual dangers of discourse abroad. While our ears areopen and our tongues free, they [Catholic adversa- ries] will hope well ofour very denials(Hall 1617:3). In the face of doctrinal difference, when English travelers to the conti-nent might be suspected oftreasonist sympathies with Rome (Einstein 1902: 155-175),travel treatises warned, "Though you hear the discours- es ofall .. discover your mind to

none" (Peacham 1622: 162). The eye found favor as affording a more detached, lesscompromising form ofcontact than the ear ... one more conducive to judicious, butsocially distant appropriations. The wise traveler kept his eyes open and his mouthclosed. Comparing the well-traveled man to an "opticke Glasse, wherein not only thespace of three or tenne miles, but also ... of the whole world itself may be represented,"or to a "true watch-tower" from which all may be viewed, Kirchnerus opens his Orationin Praise of Travel1 in Generall (1611 :C2) with an affirmation of the importance ofseeing things with one's own eyes. In this conceit, he is echoed by the Scottish travelerWilliam Lithgow, who writes in the prologue to his Most Delectable and True Discourseofa Peregrination in Europe, Asia, etc. : This laborious work is only composed ofmineown Eie-sight and occular experience; (pluris est occulatos testis unus, quam auriti de­cem) being the perfect mirror, and lively portraiture of true under- standing (Lithgow[1614] 1632:B). Lithgow repeats this association between eyesight, as direct "test" and"mirror" of reality, and epistemological grounds for certainty in The ilgrim's Farewell:the Joyes and Miseries ofPeregrination ( 16 18). I see those things, which others have byeare: They reade, they heare, they dreame, reportes affect; But by experience, I trie theeffect. The discourse "of the advantage and preheminence of the Eye" which opens JamesHowell's Instructions forforreine Travell (1642) argues the new sensory bias in detail. Torun over and traverse the world by Hearesay, and traditional rela- tion, with other men'seyes, and to take all things upon courtesie, is but a confused and imperfect kind ofspeculation, which leaveth but weake and distrustful notions behind it; in regard the Eureis not so authentique a witness as the Eye; because the Eye, by which as through a clearchristall casement, wee disceme the various works ofArt and Nature, and in one instantcomprehend half the whole universe I say the eye taketh in farre deeper Ideas, and somakes firmer and more lasting impressions. And although one should reade all theTopographers that ever writ of, or anatomized a Country, and mingle Discourse with themost age 7 mDITH ADLER 13 exact observers. Yet one's own ocular view, andpersonall conversa- tion will still find out something new and unpointed at by any otherand so enable him to discourse more knowingly and confidently and with a kind ofauthority thereof; It being an Act ofParliament among all Nations that one eye-witness isof more validity than ten Auricular. Moreover, as everyone is said to abound with his ownsense, . so in each individual man there is a differing faculty of observation. whichmakes that every one is best satisfied and most faithfully in- structed by himselfe, I donot mean solely by himself but Books also, yet a collation ofhis own optiqueobservations, work much more strongly. And indeed, this is the prime use oferegrination (Howell 1642:2-3, 5-8, underlining in original). Th e "prime use ofperegrination" is to make a "collation" of one's own "optique observations." Howell'sredundancy makes the preoccupation with sense modality unambiguous. The gentlemantraveler to whom these and similar remarks were addressed is increasingly encouraged totreat himselfas a detached and "curious" eye and his journey as an exercise in accurateobservation. When John Evelyn made his exem- lary Grand Tour of the continent, heemployed a "sightsman" in Rome (Hodgen 1964: 118). Other seventeenth century travelrelations de- scribed places in terms of those things in them which were "most ob­servable" (Bromley 1693), often ignoring people altogether (Mazouer 1980) or simplyclassifying them as "amongst the living objects to be seen" (Lister 1699:20). By theeighteenth century some travelers were calling for guides which, by cataloging "the best

· I

articles to be seen in every town in order ofmerit" would bring the rationalization ofsight- seeing effort to its final, modem conclusion (cited in Curley 1976: 242). ORIGINSOF EARLY SIGHTSEEING METHOD For a long time, aesthetic interests played littleor no role in Europe- an sightseeing practice. Architectural monuments and sumptuouspag- eantry received some attention, but reference to painting and sculp- tore, as well asto landscape beauty, are almost non-existent in travel literature of the sixteenth andseventeenth centuries- even in travel accounts of Italy where these arts were flourishing.Rather, the norms which defined early sightseeing can first be discerned in the writings ofthe sixteenth century humanists who compiled regional topographies and ambitiouslyencyclopedic "cosmographies" of the known world (Strauss 1965). The new geographicdescription was self-consciously empirical: "For I myself have walked from one end tothe other of this splendid land, and have, to the limits ofmy ability, measured it andrecorded the sight,s .. ," one Gennan scholar assured his readers (Strauss 1958)."Wandering, or traveling, as long as not business or gain but learning is the motive" waspraised as a mark of supreme scholarly effort (Strauss 1958:94). In Italy, Gennany, theLow Coun- tries, France, and England the project was devised of combining mi- nutelycomprehensive descriptions of both domestic and foreign re- gions, based upon eye­witness accounts, to create a "polyhistory" which would include all branches ofknowledge within its scope. Such pro- age 8 14 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING jects,invariably relying upon the collaboration ofamateurs, with whom their authors soughtcorrespondence, were explicitly formulated in visual terms. Regions were to be describedin the manner of a ainting-"picturae similitudine observata prosequitur" (Strauss 1958:99)-resulting in a speculum or looking glass mirroring a country in all its aspects. Bymaking it possible to "envision" whole countries through a detailed inventory of theirflora, fauna, antiquities and monuments, such projects undoubtedly articipated in the"national awakenings" ofthe period, and the travel researches upon which they werebased have some of the color of a patriotic rite (Moir 1964). It took some time for theauthors of these new empirically based "polyhistories" to break decisively with the past,insisting that seeing was better than reading, and that travel should precede rather thanfollow the interpretation of established texts. A "method" of travel com- rised of excerptsfrom Belgian and Danish geographers, translated into English and presented by one JohnWoolfe in 1589, still betrays a note of the earlier deference to traditional authority.Comparing his amphlet on travel method to a "grammar," without which a traveler wouldbe like a foolish youth, aspiring to be a Latinist without study, Woolfe promises, I doubtnot but that if' our men will vouchsafe the reading, portage and practice ofthis pamphletof notes the thicke mistes of igno- rance, and harde conception will soon be scattered, andthe same converted into a quick sight and illumination of the senses (Meirus 1589). Butafter translating Albertus Meirus' long lists ofwhat a traveler should observe, Woolfeends the tract on a humbler note, with a trans- lation of a passage from Ortelius'Itinerarium Belgiae. If in our peregrinations and travels we shall observe and note in ourtables or papers those things which seem worthie of regard, we shall make our journiesand voyages in great measure leasant and delectable unto us: not thinking that ourdiligence can search and mark anything in any place, which other men before us have notscene, but to discourse and record anything, rather than to passe the way and spend thetime in idleness (Meirus 1589, emphasis added). Gradually, travel methodologistsbecame less deferential in proclaim- ing the advantages of direct observation. Their long

checklists of things worthy of notice came to be adopted by courtesy writers offeringadvice on education to an aristocracy which was finding it increasingly neces- sary tosecure their status on the basis of claims to "noble" accomplish- ments. In theseventeenth century, a courtly ideal of the gentleman scholar, or virtuoso (an Italian termthen enjoying widespread Europe- an currency), made publicly applauded proficiency inan investigative art of travel a desirable status embellishment (Caudill 1976; Houghton1942; Leigh 1671; de Sorbiire 1660). The culture of the virtuosi was sustained by princes,courtiers, hysicians enjoying royal patronage, lawyers (particularly in France), and-in anintellectually central but socially marginal position-the tutors of the aristocracy (Frank1979; age 9 mDITH ADLER 15 Hunter 1981; Mandrou 1978). It centered upon thevalue of"curiosity," a word which had gradually moved away from its medievaldenotation of vice to signify instead a virtuous passion for secular knowledge, as well asscrupulous observation and concern for accuracy of detail (El-liott 1970:30; Howard1980:23; Zacher 1976). The virtuosi came in time to be known as "curious travelers,"travel handbooks marking objects for their attention as "curiosities," and designingitineraries which might "gratify the curiosity by degrees." The Royal academies andscientific societies, which sprang up in many European countries during the seventeenthcentury, not only fostered an international travel culture, but helped to provide an insti­tutional infrastructure for elite travel throughout the following centu- ry-Ieading oneFrench historian of the Englightenment to refer to them, along with Masonic Lodges, as"institutions de tourisme intellec- tual" (pommeau 1966: 179). If the academies providedtravelers with an international network ofcollegial support and hospitality, they were alsodependent upon them for the direct contact and personal "corre- spondences" soimportant to scholarly communication at the time (Brown 1934). After having beenreceived, a traveler might be asked to recommend his hosts, as correspondents, toeminent men of his own country, or to disseminate their publications in other centers oflearn- ing (Middleton 1971:282-5). Thus, in 1661, the young Robert Southwell, later tobecome president of the Royal Society, writes home while on Grand Tour at age twenty­six that, wanting admission to the court of the Grand Duke ofTuscany, he first sought"entrance into a meeting of the virtuosi." I put in an oar . and then got not only theoccasion of choosing good acquaintance, but heard that at the court some favourablewords assed of me (cited in Middleton 1971:285). The acquaintance was not withoutprice, for returning home Southwell is asked to set up a correspondence between thePrince and the interna- tionally famous Robert Boyle (commending the former on thebasis ofhis correspondence with Parisian scholars) and he receives a letter from anotherof his hosts instructing him to promote the sale of that person's book in Venice, Vienna,Amsterdam, Aix and Leyden. As a historian of the Florentine academy concludes, therewas a natural desire of [Italian] authors to obtain an even wider distribution for theirworks, and to do this they were quite prepared to give a good deal of trouble to foreignvisitors, who might also fmd themselves expected to perform many other chores on theway back home (Middleton 1971:282). The culture sustained by the academies accordedhigh status to travel executed in a "serious" manner. Men were praised for being "well­traveled," significant travel achievement was rewarded with honorary memberships andprizes, and erudites who shirked travel effort were denigrated as "sages of straw" (deDairval 1686:9). Travel often proved instrumental in launching international scholarlyreputations (Hahn age 10 16 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING 1971 :90). Not only did it

afford the opportunity to establish personal contact and initiate prestigiouscorrespondence with eminent men, but travel observations and voyage accounts wereroutinely publicized in the Royal Society's Philosophical 77ansactions as well as in suchperiodicals as the Journal des Savants, Journal des Treuaux, and Mercure (Broc 1974:188). Travelers might hope to become ''traveling contributors" or "foreigncorrespondents" of important scientific societies and certainly received recognition forany specimens contributed to collections of curiosities upon their return home. But mostimportantly, the academies explicitly codified and energeti- cally propagated norms oftravel discipline, roviding a forum within which travel reports were publicized andcriticized as well as translating and publishing "instructions" of travel method. Over thecourse of three centuries works with titles such as A booke called the treasure oftravellers (Bourne 1578), A direction for travaillers (Lipsius 1592), Directions forSeamen boundfor far tiyages (Rooke 1665), De CUtilite' des tiyages et l'auantage que larecherche des Antiquite' procure aux sauans (Dairval 1686), General Heads for thenatural history of a country great or small, drawn out for the use of travellers andnavigators (Boyle 1692), Brief Instructions for Making Observations in All Parts of theWorld (Woodward 1696), The Method ofInquiry into the State of Any Country (Petty1927), E ssai d'lnstructions pour voyager utilement (Bernard 1715), and Instructions forZavellers (Tucker 1757) joined the chorus ofcourtesy writers (i.e., Gailhard 1678; Leigh1671; Peacham 1622) and travel narratives to shape an internationally shared canon ofobserva- tional method. TRAVEL AS "EXPERIMENTAL" HISTORY Throughout theseventeenth and eighteenth centuries, scholars refer to travel as a branch ofhistory(Curley 1976:66; Volney 1788), history being understood, in opposition to fable, as a trueaccount of the facts, based upon first-hand observation. The "facts" requiring observationconstituted a heterogeneous assemblage ofphysical, biological, ethno- logical, andpolitical information, and historians of science have noted the absence ofany impulse atthe time to group cultural and "natural" facts in separate domains of inquiry (Broc 1974;Hodgen 1964; Rowe 1964; Shapiro 1979). Sir Francis Bacon's Catalogue ofParticularHistories, ublished with the Novum Organum in 1620, grouped the history of arts andtrades with natural history as the study ofman's work upon nature, and it was mirrored insubsequent treatises on travel method directing travelers to make careful observations ofmanufacturing rocesses. Soon, writers were exhorting aristocrats not to be ashamed toenter shops and factories in order to closely observe the labors of ordinary craftsmen(Houghton 1941). By the eighteenth century, travelers were increasingly directed to notecustoms and political institutions, but insofar as these were still understood to be effectsof the properties of air, soil, climate, and food, social description remained circumscribedby observations of natural facts. The result, a hodgepodge of descrip- tive observationwhich violates later classifications ofknowledge, is one of the distinctive characteristicsof erudite travel report during this eriod. age 11 JUDITH ADLER 17 The travelers whosecollaborative efforts, sustained over the course of several generations, were to be used inconstructing a "new philosophy" and universal history, were not expected to bespecialists. Amateur status was even believed to be an advantage. Thus AndrewSparrman, hysician, naturalist, and fellow ofthe Swedish Royal Academy, raised "everyauthentic book of voyages and travels" as "in fact a treatise ofexperimental hilosophy,"continuing, it is in the original writers of itineraries and journals that the hilosopher looksfor genuine truth and real observation; as the au- thors of them for the most part have had

neither philosophical abili- ties, nor any other motive sufficient to induce them to reportthese facts, otherwise than they have presented themselves to their notice (Sparrman[1785] 1971:~). Disciplined travel observations were regarded as "experiments," a wordat the time connoting all investigations relying upon direct sensory experience, on thebasis of which sound theories could eventually be inductively constructed and tested. Thehelpmeets of the new philosophy sometimes received royal pat- ronage or found supportthrough private subscription, but most often they paid for their travels from their ownpurse even when undertaking ublic commissions. Any distinction one might makebetween a private tour and publicly sponsored investigation blurs when applied to so­cieties whose elites remained defined by feudal rather than professional statuses, and inwhich training for public posts took place within aristo- cratic families rather thanschools ofpublic administration. Similarly, there is no evidence that the categoricaldistinction one now tends to make between narratives ofNew World exploration andthose of Euro- ean or domestic tours was made by the reading public of the time (Bideux1981 :31), or that formal publication of travel narrative can be taken as a sign of its publicstanding. Recent French scholarship has definitively established that a travel literaturewhich never assumed book form (unedited diaries, letters, handwritten manuscripts) waswidely circulated among intellectual elites and held a prominent lace in private libraries(Broc 1974; Dainville 1940; Duchet 1971:66; Hard- er 1981:88-98; Michea 1945). Inshort, formal publication was not a recondition of significant ublic reputation andinfluence. Once the ublic sphere is conceived in a manner appropriate to this premodernorganization of cultural life, one can better understand the seriousness with whichamateur travel, and its outgrowth in private letters and diaries, was discussed. With theaim of disciplining an informal corps of reliable inform- ants, travel critics castigated"untutored minds," incapable ofgiving any reliable account ofwhere they had been, whomoved "as if in a dream," seeing all through the mist of their own vanities and prejudices(Baretti 1768; Bourne 1578; de Dairval 1686; La Lande 1769). Through both advice andpraise, intellectual authorities held travelers accountable to explicitly formulated rules ofobservational method. John Evelyn, writ- ing in 1669 to Samuel Pepys, who was about toembark for Paris, instructed him in one of these conventions. Upon arrival Pepys mustage 12 18 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING mount the steeple ofSt. Jacques in order to"take a synoptical prospect of that monstrous city, to consider ye Situation, Extent, andApproach- es so as to be ye better able to make comparisons with our London" (Marburg1935:47; compare with Howell 1642:31). Having once taken the synoptical view, asystematic sightseer was expected to visit palaces, gardens, charitable institutions,libraries, and curiosity cabinets - cata- logs of whose contents were beginning to bepublished as a sub-genre of the travel guidebook (Koehler 1762; Reiske 1645).Conventional itineraries taking in important European curiosity cabinets becameestablished, and a virtuoso making the "stations" of these early muse- ums might winpublic praise for having "seen and described the con- tents of more cabinets than any mandid before him" (Lister 1699:99). In fact, the early cataloging ofEurope's museums waslargely carried out by authors describing themselves as "travelers" (Murray 1904). Inevaluating both the contents of a collection of curiosities and the worth of a traveler'sobservations, a premium was placed upon rarity. The strange and the bizarre, naturalmarvels and monstrosities, re- cious stones, rare coins, medals, and other antiquities-likeoddities of social custom -defined the focus of travel interest (Hodgen 1964: 113).

Landscape, appreciated for its "beauty" without reference to military or roductive uses,lay entirely outside it, as did all of the arts (with the exception of architecture). In contrastto both earlier forms of pilgrim- age and later styles of secular travel, the emotionsaroused by travel sights received no public elaboration. The "eye" cultivated in this initialeriod of sightseeing was deliberately disciplined to emotionally de- tache~ objectivelyaccurate vision; its commanding authority could only be jeopardized by evidence ofstrongly colored emotional response. GROUNDS OF OBJECTIVITY The ideal ofobjective vision towards which "serious" travelers as- ired was signaled by an absence ofpersonal or autobiographical refer- ence in travel narrative, and by a sightseeing focusdetermined by ublic rather than private relevancies. Those things were worth view- ingand recording, whether in letters to friends or in a journal intended for intimatecirculation, which "anyone" might have viewed in the trav- eler's place. Moral tractsaiming to establish the utility of travel distin- guished serious practitioners from idlers onthe grounds of whether more than personal pleasure was their aim. ("A purpose to travell,if it be not ad veluptatem solum sed ad utilitatem argueth an industrious and generousminde" Dallington 1605: 1). Withdrawal from the obligations of family, community andpolity, even if temporary, could be regarded as legitimate only if one traveled on behalf ofothers, sharing "all the rare and singular things one has seen with those obliged to remainat home" (Rogissart and Havard 1707:2). A discourse featuring travelers as carriers ofenlightenment, or-in Bacon's phrase - "merchants ofLight:' eventually made it plausibleto order objects in terms of their moral claim to attention. One widely read eighteenthcentury treatise enumerated "the objects most worthy age 13 JUDITH ADLER 19 of atraveler's discovery and investigation" in a hierarchy of descending order based upon thesize of community to which they were pertinent. In the fIrst class belong such objects asaffect immediately the welfare of Mankind, and consequently promote the universalgood, and may be investigated by everyone endowed with a common share ofunder­standing (Berchtold 1789: 19). After them, in second place, were objects relevant to"increasing the rosperity of a traveller's native country," followed by those which "haverespective attraction from personal advantages and . apply to that sphere of life in whichthe traveler himself is destined to act" and a fInal class of objects relevant only to "suchbranches of ornamental knowl- edge as might be cultivated without neglecting orflighting either one of the preceding classes (Berchtold 1789: 19). Most often, the attemptto ground objectivity of observation in pub- lie interest was simply left implicit. Betweenthe sixteenth and eight- eenth centuries, travel treatises and travel narratives focused uponsim- ilar lists of objects whose logic ofconstruction, though unstate~ mirrored fIelds ofinvestigation marked out by Natural Philosophy. Sir Francis Bacon's influential essay "OfTravel" (1625) presented a proto- typical list of objects worthy of observation, drawnfrom the works of earlier topographical writers and paralleling in significant respects theCatalog-ue of Particular Histories, with its "interrogatories" or topics ofin- quiry, whichformed part of Bacon's plan for the advancement of sci- ence (Bacon 1620). Guided bysuch a list (see Newton 1669:9-11), the assiduous traveler could hope for recognition asboth a patriot and a member of an international community of scholars, since the newscience to be based upon impartial and objective investigation was widely proclaimed tobe linked to the improvement of national wealth and welfare. In the main, however,objectivity was understood to be a matter of observational method, rather than focus ofattention. Anew epistemol- ogy, seeking grounds for certainty in the quantity and quality

of impar- tial witnesses whose testimony was based upon direct sensory evidence, foundexpression in a travel discourse which stressed the importance of "on the spot" recordkeeping and of dated, diurnal journals. Nulla dies sine linea, counseled the Frenchtraveler Misson (1691), thus helping to establish a new convention for the scrupulouslymaintained diary. Ob- servations recorded "on the spot" were less susceptible todistortions of memory, and a meticulous notation of the times and places in which theywere made allowed for easier checks on authenticity. Advising the traveler never to bewithout paper, pen, and ink, methodologists of travel reportage went on to explain, inorder to acquire an adequate idea of a variety of objects it conduces not a little to knowon what days they were seen. In fact, the time, manner, and the order in which thingsoccur are accidental circumstances from which much light may be derived. But the great­est advantage accruing from this method is, that hereby it becomes easier both for thewriter and the reader to distinguish what is the actual result of the author's ownexperience, from what he has, in age 1420 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING defect of this,been obliged to advance on the strength of the informa- tion given him by others(Sparrman [1785] 1971:xvii; compare with Young [1792] 1905:1-2). So strong was theconvention requiring that the act of witness and ofnotation be as coincident as possible,that even when travels were written up after a journey's completion, their authors oftensought to create an impression of authenticity by adopting the literary form of fictivedated letters (Harder 1981 :70). Above all, the traveler was enjoined to adopt a plai~

unornamented, minimalist style of report: "not to be forward to tell stories," and toanswer questions with accuracy and modest brevity (Bacon [1625] 1972:56). "Truth mustbe religiously adhered to and elegance of expres- sion banished" (Berchtold 1789:44)."My main aim having been to render all things perspicuous and intelligible," writes JohnRay (1673: A3), "I was less attentive to Grammatical and Euphonical niceties."Declaration of the intention to speak plainly and avoid rhetoric (in fact a statement ofaffiliation with the new scientific culture and its stark, technical language) becomes sorepetitive a feature of seventeenth cen- tury erudite travel as to constitute, in the words ofone historian, one of the "topoi" of the genre (Bideux 1981 :30). Shorn of rhetoricalflourish and personal romance, travel narrative could be more easily mined for "facts"which were then compiled for comparative urposes in numer- ous collections of travel"extracts" published during this period. Indeed, in the concern to rationalize travelreportage, narrative itself appears to have become suspect, and perhaps in part for thisreason travelers strove to give their observations enumerative form. "The use oftraveling," Samuel Johnson would insist, "is to regulate imagination by reality"(Schwartz 1971 :49). Touring in 1774, he care- f 11 u y notes the lengths and breadths ofcastle rooms and counts the number of steps leading to their towers. "To count," he averson one occasion, "is a modem practice"; and on another, "modem travelers measure"(Schwartz 1971:79). At a time when the mapping of Europe was far from complete,accurately gauging the height of a mountain or landmark steeple, correcting earlierestimations of climatic variation or of the distance between posting stations, counting thenumber of por- tals in a city's walls, or trees in a famous garden, had standing as agentlemanly "accomplishment I Travelers were advised to prepare for their tours bylearning something ofmathematics, erspectives, draw- ing and map-making, and to carryinstruments for measuring tempera- ture, height, and distance. Those who could afford it,sometimes hired rofessional artists to sketch the plans of fortifications, alaces, and

gardens, as well as of other natural or man-made "curiosities" encoun- tered en route.Such sketches attested to diligent observational activity and helped to defend the traveleragainst any suspicion of haste. The latter was important, since one strategy of travelcriticism was to cast doubt upon the accuracy of observations by suggesting thatinsufficient time had been devoted to carrying them out. Travelers were eager to assuretheir publics that tours met at least minimal requirements of duration (Baretti 1768; Sharp1767). The final development in the effort to create a travel method capable age 15JUDITH ADLER 21 of yielding a corpus of "objective" knowledge, based upon theobserva- tions of gentleman-scholars, was an outgrowth of techniques developed torationalize the information-gathering ractices of absolutist states. During the sixteenthand seventeenth centuries designers of an embry- onic statistics developed researchinstruments (the pre-printed ques- tionnaire, the statistical table laid out in columns)which permitted impersonally conducted and comparable inquiries to be carried out bylocal authorities (Broc 1974:221; Elliott 1970:36; etty 1927:175-78). A researchtechnology by which state administrators attempted to in- ventory people and wealth hadobvious bearing for a travel culture in which travel method was regarded as a branch ofhistory. Pre-formed questionnaires, and tables for compactly recording the kind ofinforma- tion deemed relevant to the "political arithmetic" of the period, becameappended to many travel guides. The blank tables now commanding the traveler'sattention, bade him observe not only climate, minerals, and soil, but also population,housing, livestock, clothing, agricultural roduce - in short, all the "things" which wouldpermit him to judge the relative poverty or prosperity ofa region. If it was unlikely thatany single traveler could complete all the observations indicated, this did not matter somuch as the fact that with the help of such tables he would be reminded of the commontask (West 1978). By the second half of the eighteenth century, guides for "patriotic"travelers, and essays commissioned at official request, though still blending cultural andnatural observations, thrust into focus the social and economic state of the polity and the"causes" of its health or unhap- iness (Stagl 1970, 1980; Tucker 1757; Volney 1795). Letthe traveler observe the condition of the public Inns on the great roads Let the travelermake the like observations and inquiries concerning the number of wagons which passand repass the road, the quantity and quality of the wares to be found in shops, the stateof the dwelling houses, etc. (Tucker 1757:60). And during his travels he shouldconstantly bear in mind the Grand Maxim that the Face of every country through whichhe passes, the looks, Numbers, and Behaviour of the People, their general Clothing,Food, and Dwelling, their Attainments in Agriculture, Manufactures, Arts and Sciences,are the Effects and Consequences of some certain causes; which causes he wasparticularly sent to investigate and dis- cover (Tucker 1757:10). In this new concern withwhat later came to be called "social indica- tors," as well as in the further rationalizationof impersonally conducted and more easily compiled observation, the history of amateurtravel merges with the history of early social science (Defert 1982). CHANGINGCANONS As the world open to gentleman-scholars gradually became exhaus- tivelyknown and described, at least in its immediately apprehensible appearances, amateurswere displaced by specialized rofessional agents of information gathering. Already by theeighteenth century no age 1622 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING European traveler couldany longer hope to gain the kind of recognition accorded only two centuries earlier forsuch testimony as the observa- tion that Genoa was not constructed completely in marble.

By the following century, even accurate measurement of a steeple or estimate ofa city'spopulation risked parody - i.e., in Antony Trollope's carica- ture of the "tourist in searchof knowledge" (Trollope 1866:79-80) and in Ralph Waldo Emerson's lines on the futilityof "counting the cats ofZanzibar." A travel performance which had once been taken as asign of seriousness and discipline was soon disdained as empty ritual, its epi- gonepractitioners dismissed as hacks who simply ticked off a checklist of sights alreadyexhaustively described by others. Once severed from the drama of publicly laudeddiscovery, the work of taking objective visual inventory declined in prestige. Though aprecipitate of some of its conventions can still be discerned in later styles of tourism, astyle of travel which had flourished for three centuries ceased to exist as elite amateurpractice. By the end of the eighteenth century, innovators had changed the dominantcanon of sightseeing to serve other intentions. The traveler's "eye," hitherto bound by anormative discourse rooted in fealty to sci- ence, became increasingly subject to a newdiscipline of connoisseur- ship. The well-trained "eye" judiciously attributed works of art,catego- rized them by style, and made authoritative judgements of aesthetic merit, astravel itself became an occasion for the cultivation and display of "taste." Objectivity wasstill called for insofar as the aesthetics of the eriod held beauty to be an effect governedby discoverable rules ofharmony and proportion rather than a matter of mere personalpredi-Iection. (In fact, the rule of taste often required a sacrifice ofpersonal whimsy).)But travelers were less and less expected to record and com- municate their observationsin an emotionally detached, impersonal manner. Experiences of beauty and sublimity,sought through the sense of sight, were valued for their spiritual significance to theindividuals who cultivated them. Only through communicative enthusiasm could they betransferred to the stay-at-home audience of a travel perfor- mance, and even then only inweakened and diluted form. In its aes- thetic transformation, sightseeing becamesimultaneously a more effu- sively passionate activity and a more private one. In the lasttwo decades of the eighteenth century, the Reverend Wil-liam Gilpin published a seriesof "picturesque tours" through England and Scotland which inventoried, along withpainting, sculpture, and architecture, natural scenes satisfying ictorial canons of beauty(Gilpin 1776, 1782, 1789, 1791, 1792, 1798). Applying Sir Joshua Reynolds' academicdiscourses on the newly prestigious art of painting to landscape itself, Gilpin urgedtravelers to seek "amusement" through the "art" to be found in nature, sketching andcontemplating "pictur- esque" scenes in addition to works of human artifice. Wideprospects and synoptical views took on different significance as a new canon of"picturesque travel" added natural landscape to the other "things" which an aestheticallytrained eye might hope to grasp (Gilpin 1792). Soon tourists were carrying Claudeglasses (named for the painter Claude Lorraine) through which to frame and color a view.By the following century, numerous "picturesque tours" had been published and pictur­esque itineraries conventionalized for entire geographical regions (Bur- age 17 JUDITHADLER 23 ton and Burton, 1978; Nicholson 1956). Belief in the restorative effects ofhappily constituted scenes, and an increasingly romantic orientation to aestheticsightseeing, eventually added its own legacy to the mass- marketed conventions ofa latertourism. Not all late eighteenth century styles of travel centering on sightsee- inginvolved literal vision of the scenes or objects which lay before the traveler. Earlyromantics often "closed their eyes" to immediate appear- ances in order to better seesome other reality. William Beckford of Fonthill opens a travel manuscript entitled

Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents, with a description of what he calls his"visionary way of gazing." Shall I tell you my dreams? -To give an account of my time isdoing, I assure you, but little better. Never did there exist a more ideal being. A frequentmist hovers before my eyes, and, through its medium, I see objects so faint and hazy, thatboth their colours and forms are apt to delude me. This is a rare confession, say the wise,for a traveller to make: pretty accounts will such a one give of outlandish countries: hiscorrespondents must reap great benefit, no doubt, from such urblind observations ! Allthrough Kent did I doze as usual; now and then I opened my eyes to take in an idea ortwo ofthe green, woody country through which I was passing; then closed them again,and was happy in the arms of illusion. The sun sat before I recovered by senses (Beckford[1783] 1928: 1). I neither heard the vile Flemish dialect which was talking around me,nor noticed the formal avenues and marshy country which we passed. When we stoppedto change horses, I closed my eyes upon the whole scene, and was transportedimmediately to some Grecian solitude (Beckford [1783] 1928:1). Madame de Stael'snovel Corinne (1807), cuing a comparable closing of eyes, guided an entire Europeangeneration in tourist sensibility as well as in Italy. Its protagonists banish the presentappearances of Roman sites from mind in order to invoke their past glories to an innereye and, like Beckford, model a new fashion for nocturnal, moonlit sightseeing whichleaves visual impressions muted and ambiguous. A romantic movement which, in othercultural domains, elaborated the ideal of the Gesamtkunstwerk, sought experiences ofsensory fusion and "confusion" in its travel practices as well. The more overwhelmingand emotionally colored the experience, the more surely might travel fulfill its newfunction of affording escape from sensory immersion in degrad- ed realities. The youngKeats, lanning a walking tour in 1818, enthuses, I will clamber through the clouds andexist. I will get such an accumu- lation of stupendous recollections that as I walk throughthe suburbs of London I may not see them (Keats 1959:269-70). Byron, marking thedistance between his own travels and earlier modes of investigative sightseeing, writes ofhis stay in Greece: "I gazed at the stars and ruminated; I took no notes, asked noquestions" (cited in age 1824 ORIGINS OF SIGHTSEEING Feifer 1985:153). F rom anexercise in acute eyewitness investigation and detached, enumerative observation to anoccasion for wordless gazing, nocturnal dreaming, and provisioning against sordid reali­ties - sightseeing had changed in significant respects during three cen- turies of practice.While in its various styles of deployment sight was pivotal to the styles of traveldominating this period, it was by no means the only sense modality in which travelpatterns were anchored. Among eight- eenth century tourists, for example, must benumbered the many ther- malists seeking tactile contact with waters ofvarying mineralcomposi- tion (Lowenthal 1962), as well as travelers for whom music, or even olfactionplayed a primary role in motivating their journeys. re-Pas- teurian theories ofmorbidityand health assigned the qualities of "air" ride ofplace (Dagognet 1959), and alongstanding vogue for aerotherapy, accompanied by complex articulations of olfactoryexperi- ence, continued to affect fashions in travel destination throughout the nineteenthcentury. But to trace the manner in which senses other than sight werecontemporaneously cultivated in minor travel traditions would take one too far afield.They bear mention here only in order to caution against drawing any exclusive linkbetween a single sense mo- dality and an age, the same historical period easilyaccomodating sever- al distinctive travel styles, each of which may deploy the senses in

different ways. CONCLUSION The kind of seeing first consciously cultivated by themethodologists of a post-Renaissance secular art of travel was intimately bound to anoverarching scientific ideology which cast even the most humble of tourists as part o,f acorporate, multigenerational, heroic undertaking: the impartial survey ofall creation!Such seeing, strikingly reminiscent of the taking of inventory, was accompanied by Isignificant collecting activity, as travelers transferred antiquities and other natural andman- made "curiosities" from many parts of the world to the private estates and scientificacademies of their home countries. In fact, one is struck by the fit between a fonn oftravel which featured the world as a series of ''things'' to be objectively enumerated, andacts of appropriation which lifted such things from the contexts in which they were foundin order to complete collections of things elsewhere. It would appear evident that thefonn of seeing cultivated by erudite travelers between the sixteenth and eighteenthcenturies made its own contribution to the perceptual creation of the earth as acontinuous, lawfully regulated and empirically knowable secular terrain. But one istempted to suspect as well that during the period in which, for the first time, a singlesystem of interrelated markets began to span the globe, a style of travel perfonnancewhich privileged the eye for comprehensive inventory served as one of the rituals throughwhich Eurpoean cultural and intellectual elites sought to take title to "the whole world"then coming into view. The fonn of human subjectivity such travel ritual required, honed,and exalted was one which could "grasp" this vast new world of "things" without beingoverwhelmed by itmu