Four Types of Travellers : A Study on the Rise of the Modern Travel Story

In the history of English novels there is a pattern so fondly employed by many novelists, which is to let a traveller play the leading part, presenting the story as a document of his experience during the travel. It is no exaggeration to say that most of the narratives in prose published in the eighteenth century and during the two centuries preceding it, are dependent on it. Its conspicuous prevalence during the period should be ascribable, for one thing, to the tradition arising in the day of the ancient epics taking advantage of the merits inherent in the pattern. It is to be ascribed at the same time to the passion of the age which is the age of the Geographical Discoveries, which endowed tale-tellers with a vast canvas on which to draw a story with a sense of concrete reality. We may clssify these stories into four groups according to the types of the travellers, each of which produced in the following century a number of novels exhibiing its characteristic features