There are two kinds of people (apart from those who make categories and those who don't). There are people who travel, and people who don't.

I found myself with an hour or so to kill in the city the other day, so I wandered back to that recent Melbourne Open House discovery of mine: the Melbourne Athenaeum Library. Here you can sit in a comfy chair in a pleasant, book-filled room, occasionally resting your eyes on the gorgeous facade of the Regent Theatre across the road, and enjoying the feeling that this place has been sharing knowledge since November 1839.

I spent some time with Ladies of the Grand Tour by Brian Dolan. It was like reading about myself 200 years ago. Here were women who just longed to see over the horizon. They experienced far more structural constraints than I did, since their society distinctly disapproved of female travel. But travel they did. Not many of them, admittedly. But some.

All their reasons for travel -- to get new ideas, experience difference, have points of comparison, see first-hand, LEARN STUFF -- are my reasons. And when they are "at home", they are preparing to travel. In their diaries of the 1790s or so are the same ambitious and stringent study plans that appear in my diaries of the early 1990s (the difference, of course, lies in their private income, which enabled more of these programmes to be fulfilled).

But Dolan's account also introduced me to a highly amusing member of the "don't travel" breed. If you were an impecunious "travel" person, being Lord Byron's servant would have been a wonderful career break, I would have thought. Alas, poor Frederick was the wrong type, and it was just a cross to bear. Byron even sends him home at one point in 1811:

"[T]he perpetual lamentations after beef and beer, the stupid bigoted contempt for every thing foreign, and insurmountable incapacity of acquiring even a few words of any language, rendered him, like all other English servants, an incumbrance. I do assure you, the plague of speaking for him the comforts he required (more than myself by far), the pilaws (a Turkish dish of rice and meat) which he could not eat, the wines which he could not drink, the beds where he could not sleep, and the long list of calamities, such as stumbling horses, want of tea!!! &c., which assailed him, would have made a lasting source of laughter to a spectator, and inconvenience to a master..."

After the Athenaeum, I went to see the newest film adaptation of Jane Eyre. This was an immensely enjoyable rendition, which stuck fairly faithfully to the original book.

And I had forgotten that Jane is a person who travels. Physically confined, yes, but mentally out there scouring the horizons. Here she is in Chapter 12:

"[W]hen I went down to the gates [of Thornfield] and looked through them along the road; or when... I climbed the three staircases, raised the trap-door of the attic, and having reached the leads, looked out afar over sequestered field and hill, and along dim sky-line -- ... then I longed for a power of vision which might overpass that limit; which might reach the busy world, towns, regions full of life I had heard of but never seen... Who blames me? Many, no doubt; and I shall be called discontented. I could not help it; the restlessness was in my nature; it agitated me to pain sometimes..."

And when Rochester and Jane are engaged (the first time), she asks, "Shall I travel? -- and with you, sir?", and is told, "You shall sojourn at Paris, Rome, and Naples: at Florence, Venice, and Vienna: all the ground I have wandered over shall be re-trodden by you..."

In the end, after the cataclysm, we're not told they went further than London. But maybe later...