Breaking through the Mode: Celia Fiennes and the Exercise of Curiosity

This essay explores the contribution of Baconian ideology to an emergent discourse of the nerves, using Celia Fiennes's Journeys as a case study. Viewed in the context of the Baconian propaganda associated with the Royal Society and the early eighteenth‐century literature on nervous disease, Fiennes's project offers evidence that the national myth constructed around the English as a nervous people had its origin in a campaign to reform them into a curious people.