In July 1814, Charlotte Malkin (1772–1859), accompanied by her husband Benjamin, their son, and a friend, left Bury St Edmunds on a tour of Scotland. Over the following weeks they reached Skye, Mull, and Staffa, and completed extensive circuits of the central belt and southern Highlands, taking in Edinburgh and Glasgow, the Trossachs, parts of Perthshire and Strathearn. The daughter of a Glamorgan schoolmaster, Charlotte (née Williams) was an accomplished diarist and letter writer. In an article on Charlotte Malkin’s manuscript journal of the family’s 1816 tour to the battlefield of Waterloo, Susan Matthews draws on material from the 1814 Scottish tour to illustrate the complex politics and subjectivity underlying scenic tourism in a period of war and political uncertainty. Such concerns were amplified in the case of the Malkins, well-off bourgeois reformists who had moved in radical circles that included William Godwin, Anna Laetitia Barbauld and William Blake, and later pursued a more circumspect form of social change through involvement in educational projects. Charlotte married the lawyer and later schoolmaster Benjamin Heath Malkin in 1794. Benjamin was an abolitionist and supporter of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose own travel narrative, The Scenery, Antiquities and Biography of South Wales, was published in 1804. The death of the Malkins’ son, Thomas, in 1802, was commemorated in Benjamin’s 1806 A Father's Memoir of his Child, which bore a frontispiece engraved by Blake.

Charlotte’s journal of the 1814 tour of Scotland is exemplary as both a private travel narrative, and as evidence of the published influences shaping the practice and experience of the Highland tour in the Romantic period. While the basic itinerary might be traced back to those of Thomas Pennant and Johnson and Boswell in the late 1760s-early 1770s, more prominent here is Sarah Murray’s 1799 Companion and Useful Guide to the Beauties of Scotland. Murray’s influence is clearly felt in the Malkins’ excursions around Perthshire, the River Devon, and the Trossachs, as well as in Skye, where, following Pennant, Johnson and Murray, the party stay with the Mackinnons of Coirechatacan. Present alongside Murray’s Guide, appear to be Alexander Campbell’s A Journey from Edinburgh through Parts of North Britain (London: 1802), and Patrick Graham of Aberfoyle’s Sketches Descriptive of Picturesque Scenery on the Southern Confines of Perthshire (Edinburgh: 1806), demonstrating the increasing maturity of the scenic tour of Scotland as a thoroughly documented literary and leisure practice by this time. Elsewhere, Malkin offers descriptions of lower-class manners, dress, and dwellings, which were an ubiquitous element of the genre, as well as recording her own ambivalent response to the sublime landscape. These elements of the journal might be usefully read in light of an uncertain wartime political climate, refracted through Malkin’s reformist views; these concerns are also latent in Malkin’s approving account of Robert Owen and his socialist manufacturing village at New Lanark. Malkin’s literary interests are reflected in a meeting with the author James Hogg at Edinburgh, and with Jean Armour, the widow of Robert Burns, in Dumfries. Charlotte Malkin’s 1814 Scottish journal suggests the ways in which scenic tourism, which emphasised aesthetic appreciation over antiquarian research, had allowed the Romantic tour of Scotland to develop into a more personal and reflective form of prose than that practiced by earlier writers.