Eighteenth-Century Day Excursions: Finding Authority in the Narration of Brief Visits and “A Diversity of Objects”

Kinsley, Zoë (2025) Eighteenth-Century Day Excursions: Finding Authority in the Narration of Brief Visits and “A Diversity of Objects”. Humanities, 14 (2). pp. 1-14. ISSN 2076-0787

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Abstract

This article argues that a focus on the day excursion as a particular form of journey, with its inherent limits in relation to scale, distance, and duration, enables us to bring recent critical thinking on microtravel as a form with “foundations in the depth or intensity of description” into dialogue with scholarship that has given sustained attention to modes of descriptive practice that were specific to eighteenth-century British literature and the narrative representation of interior domestic space. The three English travellers under consideration are John Loveday (1711–1789), Dorothy Richardson (1748–1819), and Caroline Lybbe Powys (1738–1817). All made numerous home tour journeys of different kinds but never published their records of their travelling in their lifetimes. All displayed sustained interest in interior description, whether that was for the purpose of antiquarian research, as was the case with Loveday, and to some extent, Richardson, or as a means of collecting, arranging, and performing domestic aesthetic sensibility, as in the writing of both Richardson and Powys. The small local journeys analysed here speak of privileged leisure: the accounts offer experimentation in the narration of journeys made within limits, but those limits are rarely of opportunity. Yet these young travellers still negotiate authority: in the practice of day excursioning, and in writing up those experiences, we see each traveller utilising this compact form to find opportunities for self-assertion, employing the formulaic structures of antiquarian record and country house catalogue in order to articulate an independent curatorial voice.

Item Type:	Article
Additional Information and Comments:	Copyright: © 2025 by the author. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license(https://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/4.0/).
Keywords:	travel writing; day excursion; John Loveday; Dorothy Richardson; Caroline Lybbe Powys; Microtravel; eighteenth century
Faculty / Department:	Faculty of Creative Arts & Humanities > School of Humanities
Depositing User:	Zoe Kinsley
Date Deposited:	11 Feb 2025 11:44
Last Modified:	11 Feb 2025 11:44
URI:	https://hira.hope.ac.uk/id/eprint/4596

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