In 1749 each member of the British Parliament received ‘The Case of the Hudson's Bay Company’, a three‐page defence of the Company's charter and a description of the climatic conditions that make Canada ‘the most inhospitable […] of any in the known Parts of the Globe’. As the Company's first public response to a fifteen‐year campaign against its policy of close secrecy, the pamphlet's attention to ‘Extremes of Cold’ shifted the tone and target of debate about the Company's monopoly – and, as this article demonstrates, it also exposed the political interests involved in producing the ‘facts’ of faraway weather.

This essay surveys recent critical approaches to 18th-century travel writing, with an emphasis on a seeming contradiction in the way the field treats the possibility that the traveller might be changed by the experience of travel. On the one hand, the traveller's vulnerability to external inf luence seems to represent a threat to British imperial authority, particularly in studies of scientific travel in the service of empire -but on the other hand, recent studies on the novel's debts to travel writing insist that the traveller's capacity to change is fundamental to any argument for travel's edifying potential or contribution to civic improvement. To resolve this divide, this article will argue that reading 18th-century travel writing for the moments in which the 'changeable' traveller appears in a positive light might help to open new avenues of research on the form and function of change in 18th-century records of scientific observation. Looking ahead, this essay proposes that future studies in scientific travel might draw inspiration from recent research on sympathetic travellers as agents of empire, and continue to investigate how the traveller's capacity for change could add nuance to our history of the scientific observer as -in Captain Cook's termsa 'disinterested' "eyewitness to a fact."Returning to an 18th-century moment in which British travels ranged eagerly "from China to Peru," any attempt to survey the field of writing about all the records kept must, as Samuel Johnson warns, require quite an "extensive view" (1-2). Rightly called an "age of peregrination" in a 1797 Critical Review article (361), the long 18th century produced thousands of pages of writing about travels both local and global -and so the field is as generically diverse as the regions it treats, encompassing forms as different as tourists' guidebooks and explorers' journals, letters on the Grand Tour and ostensibly true tales of fantastic travels to faraway places. Fortunately, thoughtful and detailed surveys of the individual worlds of writing on British encounters with China, with India and with North America have been recently published within these pages 1 -and so, to complement these studies, this essay will take as its subject the field of research about 18th-century travel and its records, or writing about travel writing. In particular, this essay will examine a seeming contradiction in the way this field treats the possibility that the traveller might be changed by the experience of travel. On the one hand, the traveller's vulnerability to external inf luence often seems to represent a real threat to British imperial authority, particularly in studies of scientific travel in the service of empire. On the other hand, recent studies of the 18th-century novel's debts to travel writing insist that the traveller's capacity to change is necessary, even fundamental, to defending the uses of travel for both personal edification and broader civic improvement. To resolve this divide, this article will argue that reading 18th-century tra...

This article examines the political significance of the detailed descriptions of Canada’s very cold weather in Frances Brooke’s epistolary novel, The History of Emily Montague (1769). In 1769, public sphere debate about Canada was focused on the difficulty of displacing French Catholic loyalties among new British subjects. By using the same terms to describe the effects of the weather on her British protagonists and the effects of French Catholic influence on the new subjects these travellers hope to convert to British values, Brooke identifies French Catholic “coldness of character” as a serious threat to the British project to cultivate affection in these colonists. By the novel’s end, however, Brooke’s protagonists also model a willingness to enjoy the weather’s influence that aligns assimilating to British values with improvements in sensibility, rather than conflict. I conclude that tracking this change in Brooke’s characters’ writing about the weather casts new light on Emily Montague’s contribution to an important mid-century debate about how Britain would imagine and manage the increasingly diverse environments of its empire.

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The activity of close reading lies at the heart of literary studies, a “signature pedagogy” that distinguishes English from other disciplines. Despite its centrality to the discipline, however, close reading has been curiously resistant to analysis. This lesson study aimed to determine where students encounter challenges in close reading. Contrary to dominant narratives in the discipline, the university students in this study were adept at formal analysis. They were challenged, on the other hand, by invitations to make intertextual and personal connections to the text. Analyzing features of successful close reading, the essay proposes that intertextual thinking and personal connection are important components. The essay recommends assessing student skills in the initial stages of teaching close reading and, when warranted, integrating instruction in intertextual thinking and making personal connections alongside formal analysis. It also suggests group discussion may help leverage these neglected components of close reading.