In his new book, Literature and Domestic Travel in Early Modern England, Andrew McRae offers the first extensive treatment of domestic travel in early modern studies. With the exception of work in transportation history and the recent contributions of literary scholars and social historians working on mobility and migration studies, domestic travel has remained a surprisingly underexamined aspect of early modern literature, history, and culture. McRae builds a convincing and impressive argument both for the significance of canonical and popular domestic travel texts to studies of early modern England and for the ways in which poets, pamphleteers, playwrights, and prose writers all engaged in active debates over mobility and nationhood. In attending to these conflicting attitudes toward domestic travel, McRae maps out a process by which the English began to move away from forms of nationhood based on settlement and placement and toward ideals of circulation and mobility. By the end of the seventeenth century, ideas about domestic travel and its role in shaping national identity had shifted from anxiety to utility: England was no longer understood to be teeming with the unstable wanderings of mobile commoners; instead, it was a networked nation, enhanced and experienced by the individual journeys of its active citizens and consumers. Literature and Domestic Travel reminds us that, over the course of the early modern period, the movements of commoners and elite alike were attendant on controversial forms of nationhood that chafed against an orthodox ideology of placement.

Genuinely interdisciplinary in its scope, McRae's book covers a wide range of literary, historical, and cartographic texts to consider how contemporaries “accommodate(d) mobility to existing models of nationhood” (2). In chapter 2, McRae extends the important work on early modern rogue literature exemplified by Patricia Fumerton's Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago, 2006) and the collection Rogues and Early Modern English Culture (ed. Craig Dionne and Steve Mentz [Ann Arbor, MI, 2004]) by deftly combining analyses of rogue pamphlets with John Ogilby's strip maps in Britannia and Michael Drayton's chorographical poem, Poly-Olbion, to suggest that rival forms of “vagrant” spatial knowledge were directly implicated in competing notions of national belonging. Each of the book's six chapters echoes this overall approach, placing popular texts in conversation with works from the literary canon as well as the theories of Henri Lefebvre, Michel de Certeau, and Jürgen Habermas, to arrive at a sharper understanding of the controversies concerning the movement of bodies and goods within England's shores. In “attempting a form of cultural history” (13), McRae arranges his book into two main sections: part 1, “Routes,” examines the conditions and contexts of early modern domestic mobility with chapters on rivers, roads, and inns and alehouses; part 2, “Travel and Travellers,” takes up distinct modes of travel in the progress, the tour, and the commercial journey. Genre (poetry, prose, and drama, respectively) might also be said to structure the first three chapters, while the accounts of the individual travels of Queen Elizabeth, Celia Fiennes, and John Taylor form the thematic cores of the latter three.

With its unique focus and original set of readings, chapter 1, “Rivers,” is one of the strongest in the volume as it effectively sets up the contrast between stasis and mobility that undergirds the book's overall argument. As the seventeenth century approached, a static, monarchical notion of parceled national space began to give way to a discourse of river navigation. Poetry and pamphlets highlighted the fluid movement of people and goods that were connected across the English landscape. This same struggle between placement and mobility emerges in the spaces of the inn and the alehouse, mainstays for travelers en route throughout England. In chapter 3, McRae explores the “unsettled transience of the inn” as it pushes against orthodoxies of location and settlement (134). Connections between spatial knowledge, nationhood, and trade also extend into the second portion of the book, most notably in chapter 6, which foregrounds the work and journeys of John Taylor, England's so-called water poet (whom McRae recasts as a “poet of traffic”) and member of the Waterman's Company (223). As a frequent domestic traveler and an even more frequent publisher of his journeys, Taylor embodies the alternative, emerging model of nationhood that celebrates the fluid, industrious mobility—the traffic—of both its inhabitants and its goods. As McRae points out early on, Taylor functions as a consistent thread throughout the book, forging a link between the everyday travels of working commoners and the remarkable journeys of royals and foreign adventurers, between experiences on the road and along rivers, and between travelers and authors.

These tightly constructed arguments begin to unwind in the book's fifth chapter, “Tourism: Celia Fiennes and Her Context.” McRae acknowledges that his use of the term “tourism” is anachronistic and makes a brief case for the presence of tourist-like travels prior to the nineteenth century. Nonetheless, the term's tie to modernity obstructs what might otherwise be a more appropriate and nuanced articulation of early modern travel acts. The connective tissue linking these “tours” seems tenuous: “travelling for reasons other than business or economic necessity” (174). Moreover, in suggesting that the genre of the travel journal invites a more individualistic response to domestic journeying, McRae overlooks the fact that the journal itself develops out of an earlier practice of local travel writing: almanac marginalia.

There is much to recommend in McRae's book, even as it leaves the reader with many questions: Just how far must a domestic traveler go to really travel? Do the means of transportation matter to the definition of the experience? Technologies of transport such as coaches and watermen's wherries seem a curious omission, as do the local movements of those traveling within towns or across the Thames to London's theaters. Nevertheless, literary scholars and historians of both the early modern period and the long eighteenth century will find great value in this ambitious, original study that connects the struggle over spatial meaning to national consciousness in new and convincing ways.