Whereas Thurbon’s actual journey is subordinate to what the journey provides – access to communities which could only recently be visited by Westerners – Raban’s journey has no goals other than to provide the opportunity to relive earlier passages along the same route, to meditate on the sea and its meanings, and to read and write.

As the earth’s wildernesses get paved over, travel writing increasingly emphasizes the inner journey, often merging imperceptibly into memoir.

Increasingly, too, travelers were being defined, or defined themselves, against the figure of the tourist. Modernity is a deeply contested term, but its original form – as Baudelaire’s modernite, dating from an 1863 essay – ties it closely to notions of movement and individuality which, in the aristocratic figure of the flaneur, or stroller, stand out against the democratization of travel marked by the appearance of Thomas Cook’s first tour in 1841.

But like many other, travelers, Johnson and Boswell concluded that they had arrived too late, that change and decline were already advanced: ‘A longer journey than to the Highlands must be taken by him whose curiosity pants for savage virtues and barbarous grandeur.” Other travelers, led by William Gilpin, journeyed to these kinds of places – Scotland, South Wales, the Lake District – in search of types of scenery that became known as ‘picturesque’ or ‘romantic’ or ‘sublime’. Modern tourist sites were being defined at this time, but travel was still for the rich and the hardy: it took ten days by coach from London to Edinburgh and a further week to get into the Highlands.

Defoe was interested in commerce and civility, but by the end of the eighteenth century many travelers, under the sway of Rousseau and Romanticism, were in search of various forms of ‘the primitive’ which, it had been realized, could also be located in Britain and its neighboring islands. . .

Many of the themes and problems associated with modern travel writing can be found in two medieval texts which still provoke fascination and controversy. The narratives of both Marco Polo and John Mandeville mark the beginnings of a new impulse in the late Middle Ages which would transform the traditional paradigms of pilgrimage and crusade into new forms attentive to observed experience and curiosity towards other lifeways.

Within the Christian tradition, life itself has often been symbolized as a journey, perhaps most famously in John Bunyan’s allegory, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678).

Societal attitudes to travel have always been ambivalent. Travel broadens the mind, and knowledge of distant places and people and often confers status, but travelers sometimes return as different people or do not come back at all. . . . So the ambiguous figure of Odysseus – adventurous, powerful, unreliable – is perhaps the appropriate archetype for the traveler, and by extension for the travel writer.

Writing and travel have always been intimately connected. The traveler’s tale is as old as fiction itself: one of the very earliest extant stories, composed in Egypt during the Twelfth Dynasty, a thousand years before the Odyssey, tells of a shipwrecked sailor alone on a marvelous island.