Why Do the Wrong People Travel

Ruminating on man's restless nature and his apparently ineluctable urge for exploration, Robert Burton looked skyward: "The heavens themselves run continually round, the sun riseth and sets, the moon increaseth, stars and planets keep their constant motions, the air is still tossed by the winds ... to teach us that we should ever be in motion." Regardless of whether the impulse lies with our stars or with ourselves, men have always traveled. Travel writing, however, has rarely been a by-product. Although accounts from antiquity and the High Renaissance survive, for most of history, individuals or migrating peoples left no description of where they had been or what they had seen. Most of the travel writing that has come down to us was composed during the hundred and fifty years of England's and France's imperial expansion and decline. Throughout that period an enormous audience existed for travel narratives, books of exploration, and the accounts of merchants, missionaries, and scholars. Works as dissimilar as Arthur Young's Travels in France and Italy, Richard Burton's First Footsteps in East Africa, and J. R. Ackerley's Hindoo Holiday all reflected this abiding interest. Few authors of consequence failed to write a travel account of one sort or another. Such narratives, however, rarely represented the very best of which a writer was capable: Dickens, after all, is remembered for Our Mutual Friend rather than Pictures from Italy, Henry James for The Golden Bowl, not A Little Tout in France. While the experience of travel occasioned a notable amount of original and distinctive work, at their most pedestrian, travel books