Patrick Brydone

Patrick Brydone FRSE FRS FSA(Scot) FSA (1741–1819) was a Scottish traveller and author who served as Comptroller of the Stamp Office.^[1]

Brydone was born in Coldingham, Berwickshire, where his father Robert Brydon was a Church of Scotland minister.

Life and work

After attending St. Andrews University, he went abroad as travelling tutor or companion, with William Beckford and some other gentlemen. On his return to England from his first tour in the Mediterranean, he published an account of his travels, entitled A Tour Through Sicily and Malta (1773), of which a second edition appeared in 1790 in two volumes. Brydone's observations of old lava flows led him to suggest that the Earth was much older than was then widely believed.

His work became popular for its descriptions, and earned the author admission to the Royal Society. The connections he thereby formed gained him the post of comptroller of the British Stamp Office, which he held to his death in 1819. Besides his work on Sicily and Malta, he was the author of some papers in the Royal Society's Philosophical Transactions.

Major works

• A Tour Through Sicily and Malta: In a Series of Letters to William Beckford, Esq. of Somerly in Suffolk (1st ed. 1773).

Bibliography

ODNB

• Chaney, Edward (2000). The Evolution of the Grand Tour. London: Routledge. 
• Fussell, Paul (1963). "Patrick Brydone: The Eighteenth-Century Traveler As Representative Man". Literature As a Mode of Travel. New York: New York Public Library. pp. 53–67. OCLC 83683507. 

References