Picaresque to picturesque

The narrators of many of today’s travel books owe something of their character to the humorous protagonists and comic adventures of the eighteenth-century novel, as well as to the introspection of the literature of the later decades of that century. The eighteenth century saw the rise of the modern novel as Ian Watt labels it in his influential study. Daniel Defoe’s Moll Flanders (1722), Henry Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742) and Tom Jones (1749) and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy (1759–67) and A Sentimental Journey (1768) are among the fictions whose plots are structured around the travels of their heroes and that draw on the conventions of the picaresque. Their mock-heroic narrators experience misfortunes that are echoed by the mishaps of twentieth-century travel narrators.

The link between travel writing and these fictions is close. The major novelists also wrote travel books, and ‘the eighteenth century … witnessed a new era in which non-fiction travel literature achieved an unparalleled popularity’. Defoe’s other works include A Tour through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1724–6); Fielding’s include The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1755). Many of the fictions are modelled on varieties of the travel book. At least two of them, Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe (1719) and Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels (1726, 1735), have outlived their times and grown into powerful cultural myths. The interrelationship between the novel and travel writing helped forge the individual narrative voice that remains familiar to us now.