In 1725, the novelist, poet, and playwright Mary Davys declared that the novel was dead. “’Tis now for some time, that those Sort of Writings call’d Novels have been a great deal out of Use and Fashion,” she observed, “and that the Ladies (for whose Service they were chiefly design’d) have been taken up with Amusements of more Use and Improvement; I mean History and Travels.” Davys’s assertion that “Novels” and “Travels” are distinct kinds belies their actual overlap in the 1720s. Jonathan Swift satirized the gullible readers of travel books in Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World, by Lemuel Gulliver (1726), and travel would remain a staple structural device of the eighteenth-century novel. Many eighteenth-century authors whom we now classify as novelists – including Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, and Ann Radcliffe – also published accounts of their travels.

But Davys was right that “Travels” – by which she meant travel books – were wildly popular. “Travels” constituted a major category of the British book trade from the first century of printing, and travel writing had an impact on almost every other genre of writing and area of knowledge. Thousands of individual accounts were published, and the seventeenth century saw a proliferation of collections. By the eighteenth century, travel books were so numerous as to need their own bibliography: in 1704, the brothers Awnsham and John Churchill published a Collection of Voyages and Travels (1704), which includes a lengthy “Catalogue of most Books of Travels” in English, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and French. The category of “travel writing,” as distinct from “Books of Travels,” encompasses an even broader variety of forms, from personal correspondence to official reports.