Britain through Foreign Eyes: Early Nineteenth-Century Home Tourism in Translation

Abstract

When Percy Shelley writes in Alastor (1815) of how a poet ‘left / His cold fireside and alienated home / To seek strange truths in undiscovered lands’,¹ the implicit irony — to be discovered by the poem’s narrator as he reconstructs the poet’s foreign excursions and death in exile — is that the alienated home has now become the undiscovered land where the strangest truths are to be found. By contrast, Alastor’s precursor, Wordsworth’s The Excursion (1814), resembles a bole closing over a foreign body, the Solitary, the collapse of whose French Revolutionary sympathies have led him to retire, disillusioned, to the English Lake District. Not only unconvinced by Wordsworth’s attempt to re-naturalize the Solitary by localizing him, Shelley dramatizes his Poet’s unsettling foreignness. Alastor’s narrator is led to one conclusion: ‘things / … are not as they were’ (lines 719–20). The Poet has had his influence on this new Wordsworth, who feels within himself what Madame de Staël has called, referring to British travellers in foreign parts, a ‘necessary alienation’, the state of mind in which incomprehension dulls the gloss of pre-conceived familiarity, that textual legacy of accumulated travel writings.² The politics of alienation are exemplified again in a March 1820 letter in which Mary Shelley satirically re-christens post-Napoleonic England as ‘New Land Castlereagh’, where those who refuse allegiance to the Tory state are branded ‘aliens’ or driven into exile,³ a tableau that expresses the liberal expatriate’s anxiety of belonging, mixed with indignation at oppressions that make expatriation a legitimate protest.