Essayists have long reflected on the reasons for travel – its educational, cultural, and spiritual advantages – often (and uncritically) championing travel for its own sake. This chapter identifies the formal aspects of essayistic British travel writing in authorial perspective, thematic content, and publication format, tracking their change over time. It shows that the discursive and stylistic development of the British travel essay was closely bound up with the diversification of the periodical press and the expansion of the empire. Ultimately, it shows that essayists developed a more self-aware and critical attitude towards travelling, informed by a sense of geopolitical, ecological, and ethical responsibility.

The eighteenth century is the richest period of georgic writing in English literary history. No era before or since exhibits a like range of experimentation with the georgic form, from translations and formal imitations of the Virgilian original to prose essays, pamphlets, treatises, periodicals and technical manuals. Though various in form and purpose, these texts declare their georgic affiliation by the tropes and themes they employ and by the structure of feeling they evoke. This chapter explores four of these distinguishing features: persistent authorial reflection on the style appropriate to georgic writing (elaborate or plain, poetic or technical?), the labour of the farmer and that of the writer, variety and miscellaneity in the georgic and traditional farming practices versus experimentation. These characteristic concerns are taken up by writers with a wide range of thematic preoccupations: agriculture, labour, sport, human health, mining, manufacturing, empire, nationhood, political economy and slavery.

The final chapter considers Sterne’s use of engraved lines as illustrations of digression. Contextualising the print history of lines, the chapter examines the history of the dance manual, which, like that of Tristram Shandy, is one of innovation. Dance manuals were visual texts that had to be ever more experimental in their attempt to instruct by means of the printed page. Tristram Shandy shares with Beauchamp-Feuillet manuals diagrams which become demystified through labelling: the four plotlines closing volume 6 and Trim’s flourish in volume 9. Sterne defers annotating these lines to encourage the reader to encounter the digressive text in a looping and non-linear manner. Trim’s flourish is remarkably like the symbols which in the Beauchamp-Feuillet dance notation system represent arm movements or dance steps, and the serpentine, Hogarthian progress of a dance like the minuet, one of the most popular dances of the mid-eighteenth century. Like Sterne’s use of dance in Tristram Shandy, Trim’s flourish, when read alongside eighteenth-century dance notation, signifies both the one-off movement of his stick and the inability of anyone in Sterne’s novel to progress in a straight line.