In the closing years of the eighteenth century, the British Critic reported: ‘Travellers continue to assert their privilege of telling their tales in their own way, “of hair-breadth escapes”, and the public seems very indulgently disposed to give them audience’. ‘Curiosity will always make travellers, and a still more extended curiosity, produces readers for their narratives’. Accounts of travels were so popular in 1798 that the editors suggested, humorously, that their own prefaces should be ‘allied to that species of composition’. They later explain: ‘We are, however, kinder to our readers than the generality of travel writers’ because ‘the hardships they encounter are generally detailed at full length; frequently, perhaps, not without exaggeration’. In 1799 the British Critic claimed that voyages and travels ‘always were, and must be, popular’ because ‘they administer to a curiosity which is liberal and almost universal’ and ‘give the satisfaction of knowledge, without exacting the labour of serious study’. Expressing succinctly the power of literary realism before critical conceptions of realism had developed, the editors wrote in 1799 that the literature of voyages and travels, of all forms of literature regularly surveyed, ‘approaches more nearly to the character of the novel, than any other book of information’.