Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c.1720–1830

Long before the “Steamboats, Viaducts, and Railways” with which Wordsworth, in a sonnet from 1833, characterized Scotland’s integration within a globalizing British industrial economy, travelling writers had been representing the Scottish Highlands as a site of economic improvement, military subjugation, antiquarian survey, and aesthetic enrichment for well over a century. Nigel Leask takes the title of his comprehensive study Stepping Westward: Writing the Highland Tour c. 1720–1830 from an earlier Wordsworth poem, “Stepping Westward” (1805), that configures the Highland Tour he and his sister Dorothy were recording as both a “wildish destiny” and a well-traveled route for English tourism, characterizations developed in a host of published tours from the previous century that constitute Leask’s archive at hand. Readers of this journal will be most interested in the first half of the book, which begins with Edmund Burt’s Letters from a Gentleman in the North of Scotland, written in the 1720s and ‘30s but not published until 1754, and moves through the midcentury monuments of Thomas Pennant’s two tours of 1769 and 1772 and Samuel Johnson’s Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775). Yet these earlier tours only gain in interest when understood as indices of an expanding transport infrastructure and economic restructuring that laid the groundwork for popular tourism and accelerating industrialization in subsequent decades. Leask is not the first scholar to attend to Scottish tours, but this book offers the first comprehensive assessment of the published literature of the Highland Tour, a corpus that constitutes both a unique cultural phenomenon and a distinct literary genre. In Leask’s words, these tours played a significant role “in developing a modern literature of place, and as a catalyst for thinking