Consumed Landscapes: Coal, Air and Circulation in the Writings of Catherine Hutton

Abstract

This essay examines a particular nexus of ideas about health and circulation in relation to the practice and the literature of travel and tourism in Romantic-period Britain. Wales, like other ‘picturesque’ destinations, is often envisaged in these writings, and in fiction, as a space of non-metropolitan purity, of clean air, and of health. Yet this is precisely the period of industrial expansion in both south and north Wales, and coal-mines, copper-works, iron foundries and smelting furnaces also figured on many tourist itineraries. Taking as its entry point the novels of Birmingham-based writer Catherine Hutton – particularly The Welsh Mountaineer (1817), which was informed by the author's own experience of travel in north Wales in the late 1790s – the essay sets the familiar trope of travel for a ‘change of air’ against the literal changes to air quality which resulted from Britain's rapid industrialisation in the decades around 1800, revealing some inventive and complex adaptations of contemporary ideas about the effects of ‘pure’ and ‘polluted’ air on human health.