Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803
Encyclopedia
Recollections of a Tour Made in Scotland, A. D. 1803 (1874) is a travel memoir
Travel literature
Travel literature is travel writing of literary value. Travel literature typically records the experiences of an author touring a place for the pleasure of travel. An individual work is sometimes called a travelogue or itinerary. Travel literature may be cross-cultural or transnational in focus, or...

 by Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Wordsworth
Dorothy Mae Ann Wordsworth was an English author, poet and diarist. She was the sister of the Romantic poet William Wordsworth, and the two were close for all of their lives...

 about a six-week, 663-mile journey through the Scottish Highlands
Scottish Highlands
The Highlands is an historic region of Scotland. The area is sometimes referred to as the "Scottish Highlands". It was culturally distinguishable from the Lowlands from the later Middle Ages into the modern period, when Lowland Scots replaced Scottish Gaelic throughout most of the Lowlands...

 in August–September 1803 with her brother William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth
William Wordsworth was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads....

 and mutual friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge was an English poet, Romantic, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets. He is probably best known for his poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla...

. Some have called it "undoubtedly her masterpiece" and one of the best Scottish travel literature accounts during a period in the late 18th and early 19th centuries which saw hundreds of such examples. It is often compared as the Romantic counterpart to the better-known Enlightenment-era A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland is a travel narrative by Samuel Johnson about an eighty-three day journey through Scotland, in particular the islands of the Hebrides, in the late summer and autumn of 1773...

(1775) by Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson , often referred to as Dr. Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer...

 written about 27 years earlier. Dorothy wrote Recollections for family and friends and never saw it published in her lifetime.

The three travelers were important authors in the burgeoning Romanticism
Romanticism
Romanticism was an artistic, literary and intellectual movement that originated in the second half of the 18th century in Europe, and gained strength in reaction to the Industrial Revolution...

 movement and thus the trip itinerary was in part a literary pilgrimage to the places associated with Scottish figures significant to Romanticists such as Robert Burns
Robert Burns
Robert Burns was a Scottish poet and a lyricist. He is widely regarded as the national poet of Scotland, and is celebrated worldwide...

, Ossian
Ossian
Ossian is the narrator and supposed author of a cycle of poems which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed to have translated from ancient sources in the Scots Gaelic. He is based on Oisín, son of Finn or Fionn mac Cumhaill, anglicised to Finn McCool, a character from Irish mythology...

, Rob Roy
Robert Roy MacGregor
Robert Roy MacGregor , usually known simply as Rob Roy or alternately Red MacGregor, was a famous Scottish folk hero and outlaw of the early 18th century, who is sometimes known as the Scottish Robin Hood. Rob Roy is anglicised from the Scottish Gaelic Raibeart Ruadh, or Red Robert...

, William Wallace
William Wallace
Sir William Wallace was a Scottish knight and landowner who became one of the main leaders during the Wars of Scottish Independence....

 and contemporary Sir Walter Scott. Dorothy's descriptions and judgments of the countryside and landscapes were a mixture of her own personal aesthetics
Aesthetics
Aesthetics is a branch of philosophy dealing with the nature of beauty, art, and taste, and with the creation and appreciation of beauty. It is more scientifically defined as the study of sensory or sensori-emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste...

 and the in-fashion aesthetics of the sublime
Sublime (philosophy)
In aesthetics, the sublime is the quality of greatness, whether physical, moral, intellectual, metaphysical, aesthetic, spiritual or artistic...

, beautiful
Beauty
Beauty is a characteristic of a person, animal, place, object, or idea that provides a perceptual experience of pleasure, meaning, or satisfaction. Beauty is studied as part of aesthetics, sociology, social psychology, and culture...

 and picturesque
Picturesque
Picturesque is an aesthetic ideal introduced into English cultural debate in 1782 by William Gilpin in Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, etc. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the Summer of the Year 1770, a practical book which instructed England's...

—in fact Recollections is considered today a classic of picturesque travel writing..

Venturing to Scotland in 1803 was not an easy trip and the thirty-year-old Dorothy would experience much of the rougher nature of Scottish life. Scotland had become depopulated in areas from emigration throughout the 18th century and the remaining rural Scots existed in a preindustrial lifestyle more reminiscent of the Middle Ages than modern times. The roads were poor and dangerous or mere cattle-paths requiring a local guide. Dorothy notes the road quality along each segment from "most excellent", "roughish", to "very bad" to "wretchedly bad". Finding a place to sleep meant finding a public house
Public house
A public house, informally known as a pub, is a drinking establishment fundamental to the culture of Britain, Ireland, Australia and New Zealand. There are approximately 53,500 public houses in the United Kingdom. This number has been declining every year, so that nearly half of the smaller...

 along the road, which could range from a pleasant inn by English standards, to a dirty and smoky peasants hut with no glass windows nor chimney and a dirt floor. More than once the Wordsworths were refused a room for the night after dark in the rain with miles to the next town; however this was contrasted by the kindness and generosity of others. Food in 19th century Scotland along the road ranged from boiled fowl and egg on the high end to whey
Whey
Whey or Milk Serum is the liquid remaining after milk has been curdled and strained. It is a by-product of the manufacture of cheese or casein and has several commercial uses. Sweet whey is manufactured during the making of rennet types of hard cheese like cheddar or Swiss cheese...

 and oat bread on the low end (or none at all in some cases), although "A boiled sheep's head, with the hair singed off" was a true Scottish fare savored.

Most of the trip was in a jaunting car
Jaunting car
A jaunting-car is a light two-wheeled carriage for a single horse, in its most common form with seats for two or four persons placed back to back, with the foot-boards projecting over the wheels...

, an Irish open-air two-wheeled cart drawn by a single horse—which because of the poor roads in practice meant going most of the way on foot. Compared to the more fashionable chaise
Chaise
A chaise, sometimes called chay or shay, is a light two - or four-wheeled traveling or pleasure carriage, with a folding hood or calash top for one or two people....

 which other travelers took to Scotland, the jaunting car was a plain and exposed vehicle, which the Wordsworths preferred as they could be travelers instead of tourists and remain approachable to the people of Scotland. There was a central luggage box and two seats facing back to back in which the riders' feet were a foot off the ground. As an Irish design, it was an unusual sight and brought a lot of attention along the way, in part because of rumors circulating at the time that Ireland might soon invade Scotland.

Dorothy wrote the journal over a 20-month period starting in September 1803. "I had written it for the sake of Friends who could not be with us at the time". Her friends admired her Recollections and it soon began to circulate and talk of publication became inevitable. In 1822 Dorothy put together a more refined version, but a publisher was never located. It would not be until 1874, nearly 20 years after her death in 1855, that John Campbell Shairp
John Campbell Shairp
John Campbell Shairp was a Scottish critic and man of letters.He was born at Houstoun House, Linlithgowshire, the third son of Major Norman Shairp of Houstoun, and was educated at Edinburgh Academy and the University of Glasgow.He gained a Shell exhibition to Balliol College, Oxford in 1840...

 would publish it for the first time. It sold so well a second edition came soon after including one in the US. Then a third edition in 1894, and then another in 1897. In 1941 it was recognized again when Ernest de Selincourt
Ernest de Sélincourt
Ernest de Sélincourt was a British literary scholar and critic. He is best known as an editor of William Wordsworth and Dorothy Wordsworth. He was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1928 to 1933 and a Fellow of University College, Oxford...

 published a new edition and deemed Recollections "one of the most delightful of all books of travel, and it is, undoubtedly her masterpiece.". In 1997 Yale University Press
Yale University Press
Yale University Press is a book publisher founded in 1908 by George Parmly Day. It became an official department of Yale University in 1961, but remains financially and operationally autonomous....

 published an edition by Carol Kyros Walker which is the current definitive edition with hundreds of photographs of Scotland, maps, footnotes and scholarly commentary.

Further reading

  • Carol Kyros Walker, Samuel Taylor Coleridge (2002). Breaking Away: Coleridge in Scotland. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-09641-0. Recounts Coleridge's long walk home after he left the Wordsworths half-way through the trip.

External links

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