CURIOUS TRAVELLERS: THOMAS PENNANT AND THE WELSH AND SCOTTISH TOUR, 1760-1820

Introduction

Thomas Pennant’s Welsh and Scottish tours were a major catalyst for the hundreds of tours that followed in their wake over the next half century. While some of these texts were published in the period, and became important works in their own right, many more remain in manuscript in libraries and record offices the length and breadth of Britain. The Curious Travellers project aims to chart the influence of Pennant on subsequent travellers to Wales and Scotland by creating a searchable online collection of these unpublished tours. Our edition of manuscripts texts from the period will enable us to explain in much more detail the role of home tourism in the construction of national histories and identities, both at a ‘four nations’ level, and in wider contexts. In considering how the selected tours represent contemporary and historical Britain, the project will also examine travellers’ engagement with vernacular Celtic cultures, including language, poetry and song, and ask how far their perceptions were influenced by contemporary ideas from science, landscape aesthetics and topography.

The following editorial guidelines were produced by Dr Alex Deans and Dr Elizabeth Edwards (Research Associates), with input from Dr Mary-Ann Constantine (PI), Dr Nigel Leask (Co-I) and Dr Luca Guariento (Web Developer).

Edition Contents

The Curious Travellers website presents transcriptions of some twenty-five (and counting) previously unpublished tours, with a range of search facilities and supporting introductory and editorial material. Manuscript home tours can be found in research libraries and record offices all over Britain, and the final selection draws on material held in geographically-scattered institutions (e.g., the British Library, the University of Manchester John Rylands Library, a range of local record offices). Substantial collections of Welsh and Scottish tours exist particularly in the National Library of Wales and National Library of Scotland, and items from these repositories form the backbone of our edition. Budget constraints did not allow for fully reproducing original images of the manuscripts online, though our introductions are illustrated with contemporary images where possible. Each document has its own individual record in the project database, containing metadata (information such as its author, date of composition, source repository). XML tagging records particular areas of interest, such as people and place names, books, manuscripts and art works mentioned. Our policy on this is explained in more detail later in this document.

Basis of Textual Policy

While recognizing the importance of reflecting the state of the copy-texts, we also aim to produce an edition in which fidelity to the sources is reconciled with clarity for modern readers, including the general public, students and specialist scholars. Our textual/editorial policy reflects that of ‘The Letters of Thomas Pennant’ in order to standardise the presentation of texts across the project as a whole as far as possible. It is therefore based, with some adaptation and variations, on that devised by Dr David Shuttleton for the AHRC funded project ‘Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710-1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh’. There are fewer examples of modern editions of unpublished travel writing, but we have also consulted Marie E. McAllister’s edition of Ann Flaxman’s manuscript continental tour, An Uninteresting Detail of a Journey to Rome (1787-9) , published by Romantic Circles Electronic Editions, and Alastair J. Durie’s edited selection of unpublished Scottish tours, Travels in Scotland 1788-1881 A Selection From Contemporary Tourist Journals (Boydell Press, 2012).

The XML schema used for our transcriptions is derived from current Textual Encoding Initiative (TEI) guidelines. Our general policy is to reproduce all of the original text of the tour, including the original paragraphing, punctuation, period spellings, misspellings, grammatical solecisms, neologisms, authorial punctuation, contractions, abbreviations, superscripts, underlinings, italics, deletions, numberings, symbols, marginalia, etc. Wherever practicable, this extends to any later additions in the form of headings, marginal notes etc. Original spelling and grammar is silently retained, however TEI <sic></sic> tags are used where apparent authorial slips or solecisms could be mistaken for transcription or editorial errors, e.g. in the case of needlessly repeated words.

We do not always reproduce the precise visual appearance of the original manuscripts in terms of layout. If any text continues down the side of a page, for example, we have treated it as part of a continuous paragraph. While we preserve existing paragraph breaks and do not impose paragraphing on a document that lacks it, our paragraphs themselves are standardised in being separated by line breaks and lacking indentation. We do not retain original line breaks, but, following McAllister, have indicated page breaks in the original manuscript by means of superscripts in the right-hand margin. In the case of poems or songs, the lineation of the manuscript has been retained. Where necessary editorial notes have been inserted in the form of clickable links, in order to distinguish them from authorial notes, which appear at the end of the text.

Transcription Guidelines

• Upper and Lower Cases: For headings, sub-sections and words appearing mid-sentence, we reproduce the original use of lower-case and capitals whenever decidable. Eighteenth-century writers often use enlarged letters at the start of sentences that are not actually capitals (in particular an enlarged lower-case version of ‘a’ is often employed). For the transcriptions, we render these as full-capitals (i.e. wherever the start of a new sentence is clearly indicated in the text by the use of a full-stop or a dash, then we start the first word with a capital letter). Alternatively, in a number of hands the lower-case letters ‘c’ and ‘s’ in particular tend to appear more enlarged, but unless found at the start of a sentence, these are treated as lower-case.
• Disguised Names: Where a name is indicated by a number of dashes (e.g. ‘Mr. F-------’), the exact number of dashes is transcribed.
• Dashes: Dashes are standardised as either short ( - ), medium (–) or long ( ––––– ) and transcribed, according to normal usage, with a single space both before and after the dash. Where obvious, we distinguish between straight and ‘italicised/curly’ dashes.
• Brackets: Where obvious, we preserve any original distinction between square and curved brackets, as well as the use of forward-slashes to serve as brackets.
• Full stops in abbreviations: These are standardised to some degree, to put the full stop (if one exists) at the end of the abbreviated word even if it falls within a superscript – i.e. ‘W^m.’ rather than ‘W^m.’ or ‘W.^m’ for ‘William’, regardless of the precise placement of the full stop on the page.
• Long s (ſ): These are standardised as lower-case ‘s’, except where they have been used as a form of specialist notation.
• Title pages, prefaces and appendices: In cases where title pages appear within a manuscript (e.g. as a mock-up of a published title page), the original lineation and pagination has been preserved. Other prefatory material and any appendices have been transcribed according to the editorial principles outlined above.

Expansions and contractions

As David Fairer observes in his edition of Warton, ‘obsolete abbreviations are by far the largest obstacle to the readability of a text’. The naturalised transcriptions therefore expand or normalise all abbreviations not in standard use today: for example, ‘y^e’ and ‘y^t’ (where the ‘y’ is strictly speaking a thorn) are expanded to ‘the’ and ‘that’. Abbreviations that are self-explanatory, clear from the context in which they appear, or occur very frequently – e.g. ‘y^r’ for ‘your’ – are retained.

Some different rules apply for specific issues:

• Abbreviated signatures: These are relatively common, especially for first names (i.e. ‘W^m.’ and ‘J^no.’ for ‘William’ and ‘John’). We do not expand these; the person record for each person mentioned is linked to the document’s database record, including the full version of their name.
• Contracted surnames: These – e.g. ‘Lady E.’, ‘Mr F----’ – are not expanded. Usages of this kind indicate informality and occasionally generate ambiguity (between Mr. Fielding and Mr. Faulkner, say), and for both these reasons they are preserved. Where the person can be identified, they have been tagged using an XML ID attribute and can be clicked by the user to reveal biographical information.
• Contracted book titles: These – e.g ‘Br. Zool’ for British Zoology – have been retained but tagged using an XML ID attribute that corresponds to the relevant bibliographical record in the database.
• Common abbreviations: We do not expand any contraction which is still in common and familiar use today (such as ‘Dr’ for ‘Doctor’, for example).

XML content markup

In addition to encoding each document’s structure (e.g. paragraph breaks – although not line breaks, in contrast with the Letters) a TEI P5 XML schema adapted to the aims of the project has been used to mark up content features of each tour: place-names (both contemporary and modern forms), people (referring to our biographical data base), published works and their authors, and art works. These elements are tagged using the <placeName>, <persName>, <bibl>, and <art> tags respectively. The significant benefit of using XML in this way is that we can apply the same numeric ID attribute to these elements regardless of how a particular feature is spelled or expressed, especially useful given the non-standardized nature of eighteenth-century toponyms, especially in Welsh or Gaelic.

Document information in the database record

The record for each document, each person, and each place, contains information in specific fields.

• ID: This is the unique numerical identifier, assigned by the database.
• Date: Where the date of the tour is not clear from explicit dating on the document itself, or where that dating is unclear due to damage or authorial error, there are three levels of certainty: date inferred, date uncertain and date approximate. Our policy is to use ‘inferred’ only if we can be certain, due to internal or surrounding evidence, of a document’s date of writing, but there is no explicit dating on the document itself.
• Languages: Languages used in the tour, e.g. English, Welsh, Latin
• Notes on the tour: Free-text notes on the tour – e.g. if the manifestation is unusual in some way.
• Repository: Name of the institution in which the original document is held – e.g National Library of Wales.
• Shelfmark: Shelfmark assigned to the original document by its repository.
• People: Each person included in the archive has their own database record, with particular types of information recorded about them, namely an ID, surname, forename, role name or title, any variants by which they are mentioned in the tours, and any additional free-form explanatory notes.
• Places: All places mentioned within the tour have their own database record, with particular types of information recorded about them, namely an ID, a standardized place name, any variant place names within the texts, GPS coordinates, and any additional free-form explanatory notes.
• Publications: Publications mentioned within the tours and bibliographical information are assigned the following information:
  • ID – This is the unique numerical identifier, assigned by the database.
  • Title – The full title of the work.
  • Author – The named author or authors of the work.
  • Year of publication – Self-explanatory.
  • Place of Publication – Self-explanatory.
  • Publisher – Self-explanatory.
  • Edition – The specific edition of the work referred to in the tour, if this is given.
  • Language – The language in which the work is printed, e.g. English, French.
  • Type – The type of publication, e.g. book, pamphlet, periodical.

Bibliography

Scholarly editions in book-form

• Battestin, Martin C., and Clive T. Probyn, eds., The Correspondence of Henry and Sarah Fielding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993).
• Durie, Alastair J., ed., Travels in Scotland 1788-1881: A Selection From Contemporary Tourist Journals (Boydell Press, 2012).
• Kahrl, George M., and David M. Little, eds., The Letters of David Garrick. 3 vols. (London: Oxford University Press, 1963).
• Pettit, Henry, ed., The Correspondence of Edward Young (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971).
• Redford, Bruce, ed., The Letters of Samuel Johnson. 5 vols. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991-93).

Scholarly editions (electronic)

• The Consultation Letters of Dr William Cullen (1710–1790) at the Royal College of Physicians of Edinburgh
• Romantic Circles Electronic Editions

Miscellaneous reference

• Textual Encoding Initiative P5 Guidelines
• Alcock, R. C., and F. C. Holland, The Postmarks of Great Britain and Ireland, Being a Survey of British Postmarks from 1660 to 1940 (Cheltenham: R. C. Alcock, 1940), and later supplements; see also their British Postmarks: A Short History and Guide, 2^nd edn. (1968).
• Fitch, Henry, The Perfect Calendar for Every Year of the Christian Era (New York: Funk and Wagnells, 1928). An on-line search on ‘perpetual calendar’ brings up several useful sites for calculating days of the week in any given month and year; see also here.
• Hunter, Joseph, ed. J. C. Clay, Familiae minorum gentium. 4 vols. The Harleian Society. Vols. 37-40 (London: Harleian Society, 1894-96).
• Hyde, Ralph, ed., The A to Z of Georgian London (London: London Topographical Society, 1982). This work reprints, with index, John Rocque’s map of 1747.
• Salmon, Vivian, “Orthography and Punctuation”, in The Cambridge History of the English Language, Volume III: 1476-1776, ed. Roger Lass (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), pp. 13-55.
• Zurcher, Andrew, et al., “English Handwriting 1500-1700: An Online Course,”. This is a Renaissance resource, but some of the later examples are relevant and helpful.