English Research Seminar Talk Dr Millie Schurch (Fleeman Fellow) Stockholm University Streetscapes and Genre in the Eighteenth-Century Scottish Tour

A new type of tourism erupted in 1770s Scotland and, with it, a new kind of text. Spurred by Samuel Johnson's Journey to the Western Islands (1775), men and women from across the British Isles wrote accounts of their travels through Scotland. This paper studies three such narratives, by the clergymen John Lettice, Donald MacNicol, and John Buchanan, to refine our understanding of eighteenth-century travel writing as a “hybrid form”, and to ascertain how writers themselves conceived of the genre of the Scottish tour.