Travel: A Literary History by Peter Whitfield

Pascal wrote: “All man’s troubles come from not knowing how to sit still in a room.” Whitfield evidently knows how to sit still, and when he thinks of travelling from his Oxfordshire home, he goes not to the airport or train station but to his library. This is a distillation of his readings, a “best of” selection by one who loves to travel via the minds of others.

Although undoubtedly geographical, this is also historical, arranged mostly by century.

The first chapter on ‘The Prehistory of Travel Writing’ spans a good deal more than 100 years. It includes his reflections on parts of the Bible, The Odyssey, The Saga of Eric the Red, and so on. Chapter two, on ‘The Age of Discovery’, starts with Columbus and runs through to Richard Hakluyt’s collection The Principal Navigations Traffiques & Discoveries of the English Nation, published in 1589, “revealing regions of the world that were open and accessible.” Judging by the number of references, the 19th century is his favourite.

He sensitively considers why people travelled, how they saw the world from within their own cultural constraints, how their views changed in the light of experience, and speculates on our own current paradigm, which he sees primarily as the “the definition of identity” through both escape and understanding.

Overall, this is an outstanding insight into the rich history of the genre. His selection is admirable, and gives useful pointers to less familiar writers.

Inevitably, many travel writers have been omitted, including at least one of my favourites (Dervla Murphy), and he makes no comment on web-based travel writing, from blogs to Tripadvisor, or on the just slightly less ephemeral newspaper and magazine writing filling the shelves. Perhaps he’s saving his thoughts on those for volume two. The author will be at the Oxford Literary Festival on Saturday.