Eccentricity, impartiality and sentimental travel in George Carey’s The Balnea (1799-1801)

Guidebooks are by now an integral feature within travel writing studies. This article presents a detailed contextual reading of George Carey’s The Balnea (1799–1801): the first general guidebook to English leisure resorts. Although the work is occasionally cited by scholars, little attention has been paid to The Balnea’s status as a text, to the changes that were made across its three editions, or to its nineteenth-century afterlife. My discussion elaborates both the pioneering aspects of Carey’s text and the clash it stages between two distinct forms of travel writing: the systematic guidebook and the first-person travelogue. A digressive and uneven work, The Balnea struggles to match Carey’s ambitions for either comprehensiveness or impartiality. At the same time, I argue, Carey’s incorporation of a series of sentimental anecdotes and ballads engenders misgivings about his reliability as an author and the factual grounding of the text-as-travelogue.