English travel literature in the eighteenth century

Abstract

The literature of travel in the eighteenth century is an uncharted ocean which seems to have repelled explorers by its very vastness and by the ungenial climate which is thought to prevail in the latitudes wherein it lies. Yet this literature . which is so forbidding to modern reader, enjoyed such popularity in its own day that Shaftesbury, writing in 1710, could speak of Travels as "the chief materials to furnish out a library ", and declare that "these are in our present days what books of chivalry were in our forefathers' ". His statement is literally true; during the later years of the 17th century and throughout the 18th century, books of travel poured from the press; and it would seem that the native accounts of actual voyages were not sufficient to satisfy the public demand, for translations of foreign works appeared in prodigious numbers.