© The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press 2005; all rights reserved
Dorothy Richardson's Manuscript Travel Journals (1761–1801) and the Possibilities of Picturesque Aesthetics
Liverpool Hope University
In the latter decades of the eighteenth century the aesthetic school of the picturesque, and the vocabulary which it popularized, greatly influenced the way in which travellers engaged with, and gave expression to, the landscapes of Britain. At the same time, however, that aesthetic tradition came to be fairly extensively criticized and satirized, by figures such as Austen and Wordsworth, as a tautologous and prescriptive mode of discourse. Dorothy Richardson's five volumes of manuscript travel journals (1761–1801) invite a reassessment of the ways in which the individual engaged with picturesque precepts. It has been claimed that, while Richardson's articulation of historical and antiquarian details of place demonstrates a positive appropriation of forms of knowledge from which women were generally excluded, her use of picturesque terminology is merely ‘predictable’ and ‘set-piece’. The article offers a different interpretation of these documents, arguing that an examination of the texts alongside works by contemporary travellers such as William Gilpin and Arthur Young shows Richardson exploiting the possibilities offered to her by picturesque aesthetics. The picturesque simultaneously enables her to organize and bring coherence to her experiences of the unfamiliar landscapes of travel, while allowing her the opportunity to enter a predominantly male discursive forum and offer her own interpretation of its ideology.