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`An utterly
absorbing account, brilliantly researched and written, of women's lives and
travels in the 18th-century.' Katie Hickman According to `The Art of Governing
A Wife' (1747), women in Georgian England were supposed to `lay up and save,
look to the house; talk to few and take of all within'. However, some broke
from these taboos and took up the previously male privilege of travelling to
the Continent to develop mind, spirit and body. Hearing of the delights of the
Grand Tour from pioneering friends, increasing numbers of English ladies set
off to sample foreign lands from which many returned apparently `the best
informed and most perfect creatures'. For others the Grand Tour was an
intellectual and romantic rite of passage, widening their knowledge of society,
love and politics and inspiring a genre of literary fiction all of its own.
Brian Dolan leads us into the hearts and minds of the ladies through the
stories, thoughts and court gossip recorded in their journals, letters and
diaries.
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Women's travel: Women who broke the bell jar
Joanna Symons reviews Ladies of the Grand Tour
by Brian Delan
12:01AM BST
15 Jun 2001
AS you set
off on holiday this summer, spare a thought for the adventurous women of
18th-century England: trapped not so much beneath a glass ceiling as in a bell
jar.
Georgian
England was, according to Brian Dolan, run like a gentleman's club. Though the
advantages of the Grand Tour for young men were widely acknowledged, such
experiences were considered too stimulating for women. Their role, according to
a contemporary work, The Art of Governing a Wife, was to "lay up and save;
look to the house; talk to few; take of all within".
But some
women did break the mould, to experience the wonders and pitfalls of
Continental travel. These were not frivolous sun-seekers but well-educated blue
stockings with a thirst for experience, who held strong opinions and were not
slow to express them.
One wonders
what European society made of Elizabeth Montague, who, Dolan reveals, returned
one night from a ball and, still in formal dress, "chose to relax by
reading the 'Ajax' and the 'Philoctetes' of Sophocles, wrote commentaries on
both, then went to bed".
It is the
stories of these women, set against the culture of the time, that Dolan sets
out to explore; characters such as the writers Mary Berry and Mary
Wollstonecraft, Maria Edgeworth and Hesther Thrale, whose diaries and journals
vividly capture their fascination with (and sometimes disapproval of) European
ways.
Their
voices bring the book alive - whether they're exclaiming over French fashions
or the French Revolution. Annoyingly, we don't hear enough of them.
Dolan has
researched his subject thoroughly (the bibliography is almost a chapter long)
but it's not until halfway through the book that you hear more than the odd
snippet of life abroad. I began to feel as frustrated as the women themselves:
I wanted to share their experiences across the Channel.
Dolan flits
from one character to another; I had to keep turning to the dramatis personae
section to keep track of who was who. Reading this book is rather like drifting
along in a boat with one oar. You're not sure where you're going, it takes a
long time to get there, but there's always a chance of bumping into something
fascinating.
Gin and pistols
Vera Rule on women at sea in Heroines and
Harlots by David Cordingly, and Ladies of the Grand Tour by Brian Dolan
Vera Rule
Sat 9 Jun
2001 10.17 BST First published on Sat 9 Jun 2001 10.17 BST
Heroines and Harlots: Women at Sea in the Great
Age of Sail
David
Cordingly
334pp,
MacMillan
Ladies of the Grand Tour
Brian Dolan
330pp,
HarperCollins, £19.99
What a fab
party of women to be stranded with at an airport terminal gate. High-born
(salonista Lady Holland, "the only really undisputed monarchy in
Europe") and lowlife (China Emma, the Limehouse sailors' whore, who
growled "I'd die for a drink, I must have it, and I don't care what I does
to get it"); horribly real (Helen Williams, in fear of the guillotine in
the Luxembourg Palace) and wildly fictional (Hannah Hewitt, the "Female
Crusoe", cast away en route to India in a 1792 novel). They take the
waters at Spa and Aix; they take lovers in Paris and Naples; they shop and ship
by the crate; they adopt riding habits and are called "Sir"; they put
on white duck trousers and pass themselves off for years as sailors, presumably
pissing very discreetly.
That last
group, the female mariners, appear in Heroines and Harlots ; these superboys
with tits hidden under canvas jackets had a Lara Croft-like appeal to the
18th-century popular imagination. Some 20 of them were known to have served at
sea between 1650 and 1815, including "William Brown", young, black
and handsome, who joined the British navy and spent 12 years as "captain
of the foretop" - leader of the team that climbed aloft to set the
riskiest sails on battleships of the Napoleonic wars. Cordingly's anecdotes
make us want to buy the movie rights, and even when her sex was revealed it
didn't end her career; she rejoined her fellow tars at a higher rank before
evaporating from the records.
She was not
the first to be lioness-ised: Mary Lacy, a carpenter's mate, put in 12-hour
days plus serious drinking time in Chatham dockyard to qualify as a shipwright.
She was at last awarded, by a confused Admiralty, a disability pension
"equal to that granted to Superannuated Shipwrights" and probably
better than she could draw now. Then there was Hannah Snell, a marine who was
wounded 12 times in the siege of Pondicherry in India; she had to extract a
musket ball from her own groin as she dared not let surgeons discover her
secret. Well, that's what the contemporary biography claimed, although its
other nasty incidents, including naked-torso'ed floggings, sound suspiciously
like the male author's sadistic fantasies. Published in the US in 1815, and
with even more blockbuster potential, were the adventures of Louisa Baker, a ruined
Bostonian girl who, bandaging her bosom and pulling on a tight "pair of
under draws" - which she apparently never changed - fled a life of
prostitution to become a sharpshooter high in the rigging of famous men'o'war.
She married a wealthy New Yorker and lived quietly ever after, which last
improbable plot developments reveal that the miniseries was dreamed up by a
scriptwriter employed by a Boston pop publisher: both men, natch.
In fact,
and in fiction, the women are present mostly to serve masculine purposes - for
a start, those of their authors. David Cordingly's work reads, right down to
its trollopy title, as if he had expanded it from a minor chapter in an
ocean-going history - the kind of segment that uses up a historian's spicier
notes on the incidence of mermaids before he returns, with relief, to analysing
the protein content of weevils in ships' biscuits.
I had the
impression that the only time Cordingly felt safe using the word
"she" was when he was writing of a vessel; he too often cites a woman
merely so that he can give a detailed account of her menfolk. Or he introduces
them as conquests, entitling one section "Two Naval Heroes and Their
Women", permitting Their Women only supernumary roles - even carved wooden
figureheads (and Cordingly has a chapter on those, too) are allowed more
individual character than his Emma Hamilton. He also employs fake-empathetic
"what must have been her feelings" formulas, as when he writes about
Mary Patten, a merchant captain's young bride who took command of the ship
round Cape Horn when her husband fell sick. But overall his approach is a
nervous raise of the glass to the ladies, god bless 'em. I did appreciate,
though, a nautical ballad in the appendix: "Oh cruel was the splinter to
break my deary's leg / Now he's obliged to fiddle, and I'm obliged to beg . . .
/ Like me you'll be rewarded, and have your heart's delight, / With fiddling in
the morning, and a drop of gin at night. " Bet that anon balladeer was a
woman.
Brian Dolan
admits to expanding Ladies of the Grand Tour from a file left over from
research on 18th-century British travellers, and makes even such unbiddable
biddies as the bluestocking educationalist Hannah More demonstrate his own (not
uninteresting) history-of-medicine thesis about the therapeutic effects of
continental travel upon grand ladies. But when he quotes his sources in proof
of his postulations, his gloss gets in the way (especially since his prose
tends to the smooth ponderousness of presenter-ese). Better to read their words
unmediated: they constantly subvert his.
There is
nothing in Dolan's own sentences as informative about the robustness required
for Georgian journeying as the items he cites from Mariana Starke's 1792
"things most requisite list" - "Two large thick leather-sheets .
. . Pistols, knives . . . Sugar-tongs". Nor is there anything as
celebratory of newfound freedom as Hester Piozzi's description of Parisian
boulevards: "People of Fashion sitting on chairs in little Parties of five
& six . . . a sett of Footmen round a Table drinking beer, old Soldiers
smoaking, Shopwomen and Abigails . . . Puppet Shews, raree Shews, Monsters, Dancing
Dogs".
I confess I
can hardly remember Dolan's final conclusions, and I reread them twice out of
politeness. Something about the stock of female knowledge continuing to
increase - and what does that mean? And yet, I've been prompted by him to think
all week about Mary Wollstonecraft, pregnant by her American lover, in a
hideaway outside Paris during the Terror. There she penned her proto
the-personal-is-political sentence - "The face of things, public and
private, vexes me" - and worried that her anguish about the disintegrating
revolution might be "tormenting or perhaps killing, a poor little animal,
about whom I am grown anxious and tender, now I feel it alive". I wish she
could be sitting in the window seat next time I fly.
Christopher
Hibbert
Prolific popular
historian who brought style and narrative pace to a wealth of subjects from
Agincourt to Disraeli
Christopher
Hibbert
6:31PM GMT 23 Dec 2008
Christopher
Hibbert, who died on December 21 aged 84, was a prolific popular historian,
praised by readers and reviewers alike for his meticulous scholarship and
flowing prose.
Following
in the tradition of such figures as Philip Guedalla and Sir Arthur Bryant,
Hibbert strove to bridge the gap between popular history and academic
scholarship.
In a
writing career that spanned half a century he wrote more than 40 books on
subjects ranging from the Indian Mutiny and the House of Medici to the cities
of Florence and Venice; from battles such as Agincourt and Arnhem to
biographies of Dickens and Mussolini.
His
breakthrough came with his fourth book, The Destruction of Lord Raglan (1961),
a history of the Crimean War for which he won the Heinemann Award for
Literature.
Once
described as the "pearl of biographers", Hibbert covered some of the
most august figures in British history, including Charles I (1968), Samuel
Johnson (1971), Elizabeth I (1990), Nelson (1994), Wellington (1997), George
III (1998), Queen Victoria (2000) and Disraeli (2004).
He was the
first person to use the papers of George IV, when he produced his two-volume
biography (1972-73). Often called "personal histories", his
biographies were human portraits which eschewed deep analysis in favour of
using anecdote and narrative to reveal the character of the subject.
Hibbert
equated popular history with the narrative style. His intention was to describe
rather than explain, leaving the reader to his or her own reflections. He
noted: "The main aim is to entertain and tell a good, accurate story
without attempting to make historical discoveries or change historical opinion
in any way. You've got to make the reader want to know what's going to happen
next, even if you're writing about something, the outcome of which is well
known. You have to build up an atmosphere, almost like writing a novel or
detective story. The popular historian's books are almost invariably narrative
– which in many academic quarters is considered not the way to write
history." While academics wanted analysis, Hibbert was adamant that he did
not do that: "My readers wouldn't want me to."
Although
his style was sometimes criticised for failing to break new ground or to tackle
subjects in enough depth, Hibbert was sure of his methodology and his audience.
He described himself as writing for those who were interested in history but
who did not have the time or inclination to read an abundance of academic scholarship.
He strove to make his writing accessible, and as a consequence his books were
written with great style and a brisk narrative pace. They were rich in anecdote
and filled with choice quotations.
Christopher
Hibbert was born on March 5 1924 in Leicestershire, the second son of Canon HV
Hibbert. He was educated at Radley and Oriel College, Oxford, where his studies
were interrupted by war service, but not before he had won a half Blue for
boxing. He served as an infantry officer with the London Irish Rifles and
fought in Italy from 1944 to 1945, and was awarded a Military Cross.
During an
advance along the bank of the Senio river in February 1945, Hibbert's platoon
encountered a minefield. One member had his foot blown off in an explosion that
brought down enemy fire, causing the others to withdraw. With complete
disregard for his own safety Hibbert rescued the wounded man from the minefield
while under fire.
Shortly
after this Hibbert had his spectacles blown from his face when he was nearly
hit by a mortar bomb. Despite his reduced vision he reorganised his platoon and
went on to assault enemy machine-gun posts. His determined action meant that
his platoon was able to occupy positions along the river, which ensured the
safety of the rest of the advancing company.
On another
occasion, while in a farmhouse being used as an observation post during an
attack on the German lines, he found himself confronted by the farmer's wife.
She was in a state of advanced labour, and when asked later how he had coped he
replied: "I asked for plenty of hot water, remembering that was the
standard request in films, but fortunately the farmer's wife seemed to know
what to do!"
After the
war, Hibbert returned to Oxford to complete his History degree before settling
in Henley-on-Thames and embarking on a career as an estate agent. His literary
career began when a friend invited him to become a television critic – a
novelty at the time – for the magazine Truth.
After
publishing short stories he was encouraged by JR Ackerley, literary editor of
The Listener, to attempt a novel. His tale of the highwayman Jack Sheppard was
turned, at the suggestion of a publisher, into a historical work and appeared
as The Road to Tyburn in 1957. After King Mob (1958) and Wolfe at Quebec (1959),
the success of The Destruction of Lord Raglan led him to take up writing full
time.
From then
on Hibbert never looked back, completing books at the rate of roughly one a
year and enjoying popular success. Not only were his works widely read in Britain
and America, they were also translated into many languages. His book The Grand
Tour was turned into an ITV series in 1987.
Described
as possessing "the sprightly, genial air of a cheerful curate",
Hibbert was a sociable man with friends who delighted in his company. He
enjoyed gardening, cooking and travel.
He also
loved walking, though at times his choice of footwear was a little unorthodox.
He once arrived on the summit of Great Gable, in the Lake District, wearing
wellington boots, producing incredulous stares from a group of experienced
climbers who had come up the hard side.
He served
as president of the Johnson Society in 1980, and was awarded an honorary DLitt
by Leicester University in 1996. He was a Fellow of the Royal Society of
Literature.
Christopher
Hibbert married, in 1948, Susan Piggford, a fellow undergraduate at Oxford. They
had two sons and a daughter.
She is the
daughter of historian and historical biographer Lady Antonia Fraser and the
late Sir Hugh Fraser, a British Conservative politician. Her stepfather was the
playwright Harold Pinter, the 2005 Nobel Laureate in Literature, her mother's
second husband until his death in 2008. Her maternal grandparents were the late
Elizabeth Longford, also an eminent biographer, and the late Lord Longford, a
well-known politician, social reformer, and author.
She was
named after Scottish Jacobite Flora MacDonald. Using her maiden name Flora
Fraser, she has written biographies of Emma Hamilton, Caroline of Brunswick,
the daughters of George III, and Pauline Bonaparte
The Grand
Tour was the traditional trip of Europe undertaken by mainly upper class
European young men of sufficient means and rank (or those of more humble origin
who could find a sponsor), as well as young women if they were also of sufficient
means, and accompanied by a chaperon, such as other family members, when they
had come of age (about the age of 21 years old)The custom flourished from about
1660, until the advent of large-scale rail transport in the 1840s, and was associated
with a standard itinerary. It served as an educational rite of passage. Though
primarily associated with the British nobility and wealthy landed gentry,
similar trips were made by wealthy young men of other Protestant Northern
European nations, and from the second half of the 18th century, by some South
and North Americans. The tradition declined with the lapse of neo-classical
enthusiasm and after rail and steamship travel made the journeys much easier
when Thomas Cook made the "Cook's Tour" of early mass tourism a
byword.
The New
York Times in 2008 described the Grand Tour in this way:
Three
hundred years ago, wealthy young Englishmen began taking a post-Oxbridge trek
through France and Italy in search of art, culture and the roots of Western civilization.
With nearly unlimited funds, aristocratic connections and months (or years) to
roam, they commissioned paintings, perfected their language skills and mingled
with the upper crust of the Continent.
— Gross,
Matt., "Lessons From the Frugal Grand Tour." New York Times 5
September 2008.
The primary
value of the Grand Tour, it was believed, lay in the exposure both to the
cultural legacy of classical antiquity and the Renaissance, and to the
aristocratic and fashionably polite society of the European continent. In
addition, it provided the only opportunity to view specific works of art, and
possibly the only chance to hear certain music. A Grand Tour could last from
several months to several years. It was commonly undertaken in the company of a
Cicerone, a knowledgeable guide or tutor. The Grand Tour had more than
superficial cultural importance; as E. P. Thompson stated, "ruling-class
control in the 18th century was located primarily in a cultural hegemony, and
only secondarily in an expression of economic or physical (military)
power." The legacy of the Grand Tour lives on to the modern day and is
still evident in works of travel and literature. From its aristocratic origins
and the permutations of sentimental and romantic travel to the age of tourism
and globalization, the Grand Tour still influences the destinations tourists
choose and shapes the ideas of culture and sophistication that surround the act
of travel.
In essence,
the Grand Tour was neither a scholar's pilgrimage nor a religious one, though a
pleasurable stay in Venice and a cautious residence in Rome were essential.
Catholic Grand Tourists followed the same routes as Protestant Whigs. Since the
17th century, a tour to such places was also considered essential for budding young
artists to understand proper painting and sculpture techniques, though the
trappings of the Grand Tour—valets and coachmen, perhaps a cook, certainly a
"bear-leader" or scholarly guide—were beyond their reach. The advent
of popular guides, such as the Richardsons', did much to popularise such trips,
and following the artists themselves, the elite considered travel to such
centres as necessary rites of passage. For gentlemen, some works of art were
essential to demonstrate the breadth and polish they had received from their
tour: in Rome, antiquaries like Thomas Jenkins provided access to private
collections of antiquities, among which enough proved to be for sale that the
English market raised the price of such things, and for coins and medals, which
formed more portable souvenirs and a respected gentleman's guide to ancient
history. Pompeo Batoni made a career of painting the English milord posed with
graceful ease among Roman antiquities. Many continued on to Naples, where they
viewed Herculaneum and Pompeii, but few ventured far into Southern Italy or
Malta, and fewer still to Greece, still under Turkish rule.
In Britain,
Thomas Coryat's travel book Coryat's Crudities (1611), published during the
Twelve Years' Truce, was an early influence on the Grand Tour but it was the
far more extensive tour through Italy as far as Naples undertaken by the
'Collector' Earl of Arundel, with his wife and children in 1613–14 that
established the most significant precedent. This is partly because he asked
Inigo Jones, not yet established as an architect but already known as a 'great
traveller' and masque designer, to act as his cicerone (guide). Larger numbers
of tourists began their tours after the Peace of Münster in 1648. According to
the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term (perhaps its
introduction to English) was by Richard Lassels (c. 1603–1668), an expatriate
Roman Catholic priest, in his book The Voyage of Italy, which was published
posthumously in Paris in 1670 and then in London.[a] Lassels's introduction
listed four areas in which travel furnished "an accomplished, consummate
Traveller": the intellectual, the social, the ethical (by the opportunity
of drawing moral instruction from all the traveller saw), and the political.
The idea of
travelling for the sake of curiosity and learning was a developing idea in the
17th century. With John Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), it
was argued, and widely accepted, that knowledge comes entirely from the
external senses, that what one knows comes from the physical stimuli to which
one has been exposed. Thus, one could "use up" the environment,
taking from it all it offers, requiring a change of place. Travel, therefore,
was necessary for one to develop the mind and expand knowledge of the world. As
a young man at the outset of his account of a repeat Grand Tour, the historian
Edward Gibbon remarked that "According to the law of custom, and perhaps of
reason, foreign travel completes the education of an English gentleman."
Consciously adapted for intellectual self-improvement, Gibbon was
"revisiting the Continent on a larger and more liberal plan"; most
Grand Tourists did not pause more than briefly in libraries. On the eve of the
Romantic era he played a significant part in introducing, William Beckford
wrote a vivid account of his Grand Tour that made Gibbon's unadventurous
Italian tour look distinctly conventional.
The typical
18th-century sentiment was that of the studious observer travelling through
foreign lands reporting his findings on human nature for those unfortunate
enough to have stayed home. Recounting one's observations to society at large
to increase its welfare was considered an obligation; the Grand Tour flourished
in this mindset.
The Grand
Tour offered a liberal education, and the opportunity to acquire things
otherwise unavailable at home, lending an air of accomplishment and prestige to
the traveller. Grand Tourists would return with crates full of books, works of
art, scientific instruments, and cultural artifacts – from snuff boxes and
paperweights, to altars, fountains, and statuary – to be displayed in
libraries, cabinets, gardens, drawing rooms, and galleries built for that
purpose. The trappings of the Grand Tour, especially portraits of the traveller
painted in iconic continental settings, became the obligatory emblems of
worldliness, gravitas and influence. Artists who especially thrived on Grand
Tourists included Carlo Maratti, who was first patronized by John Evelyn as
early as 1645, Pompeo Batoni the portraitist, and the vedutisti such as
Canaletto, Pannini and Guardi. The less well-off could return with an album of
Piranesi etchings.
The
"perhaps" in Gibbon's opening remark cast an ironic shadow over his
resounding statement.Critics of the Grand Tour derided its lack of adventure.
"The tour of Europe is a paltry thing", said one 18th century critic,
"a tame, uniform, unvaried prospect".The Grand Tour was said to
reinforce the old preconceptions and prejudices about national characteristics,
as Jean Gailhard's Compleat Gentleman (1678) observes: "French courteous.
Spanish lordly. Italian amorous. German clownish." The deep suspicion with
which Tour was viewed at home in England, where it was feared that the very
experiences that completed the British gentleman might well undo him, were
epitomised in the sarcastic nativist view of the ostentatiously
"well-travelled" maccaroni of the 1760s and 1770s.
Also worth
noticing is that the Grand Tour not only inspired stereotypes among the
countries themselves but also led to a dynamic between the northern and
southern Europe. By constantly depicting Italy as a "picturesque
place", the travellers also unconsciously degrade Italy as a place of
backwardness. This unconscious degradation is best reflected in the famous
verses of Lamartine in which Italy is depicted as a "land of the past...
where everything sleeps."
After the
arrival of steam-powered transportation, around 1825, the Grand Tour custom
continued, but it was of a qualitative difference — cheaper to undertake,
safer, easier, open to anyone. During much of the 19th century, most educated
young men of privilege undertook the Grand Tour. Germany and Switzerland came
to be included in a more broadly defined circuit. Later, it became fashionable
for young women as well; a trip to Italy, with a spinster aunt as chaperone,
was part of the upper-class woman's education, as in E. M. Forster's novel A
Room with a View.
The most
common itinerary of the Grand Tour shifted across generations in the cities it
embraced, but the British tourist usually began in Dover, England and crossed
the English Channel to Ostend,[b] in Belgium, or to Calais or Le Havre in
France. From there the tourist, usually accompanied by a tutor (known
colloquially as a "bear-leader") and (if wealthy enough) a troop of
servants, could rent or acquire a coach (which could be resold in any city or
disassembled and packed across the Alps, as in Giacomo Casanova's travels, who
resold it on completion), or opt to make the trip by boat as far as the Alps,
either travelling up the Seine to Paris, or up the Rhine to Basel.
Upon hiring
a French-speaking guide, as French was the dominant language of the elite in
Europe during the 17th and 18th centuries, the tourist and his entourage would
travel to Paris. There the traveller might undertake lessons in French,
dancing, fencing, and riding. The appeal of Paris lay in the sophisticated
language and manners of French high society, including courtly behavior and
fashion. This served the purpose of preparing the young man for a leadership
position at home, often in government or diplomacy.
From Paris
he would typically go to urban Switzerland for a while, often to Geneva (the
cradle of the Protestant Reformation) or Lausanne. ("Alpinism" or
mountaineering developed in the 19th century.) From there the traveller would
endure a difficult crossing over the Alps into northern Italy (such as at the
Great St Bernard Pass), which included dismantling the carriage and luggage. If
wealthy enough, he might be carried over the hard terrain by servants.
Once in
Italy, the tourist would visit Turin (and, less often, Milan), then might spend
a few months in Florence, where there was a considerable Anglo-Italian society
accessible to travelling Englishmen "of quality" and where the
Tribuna of the Uffizi gallery brought together in one space the monuments of
High Renaissance paintings and Roman sculptures that would inspire picture
galleries adorned with antiquities at home, with side trips to Pisa, then move
on to Padua, Bologna, and Venice. The British idea of Venice as the "locus
of decadent Italianate allure" made it an epitome and cultural setpiece of
the Grand Tour.
From Venice
the traveller went to Rome to study the ruins of ancient Rome, and the
masterpieces of painting, sculpture, and architecture of Rome's Early
Christian, Renaissance, and Baroque periods. Some travellers also visited
Naples to study music, and (after the mid-18th century) to appreciate the
recently discovered archaeological sites of Herculaneum and Pompeii, and
perhaps (for the adventurous) an ascent of Mount Vesuvius. Later in the period
the more adventurous, especially if provided with a yacht, might attempt Sicily
(the site of Greek ruins), Malta or even Greece itself. But Naples – or later
Paestum further south – was the usual terminus.
From here
the traveller traversed the Alps heading north through to the German-speaking
parts of Europe. The traveller might stop first in Innsbruck before visiting
Vienna, Dresden, Berlin and Potsdam, with perhaps some study time at the
universities in Munich or Heidelberg. From there travellers visited Holland and
Flanders (with more gallery-going and art appreciation) before returning across
the Channel to England.
Published
accounts
Published
(and often polished) personal accounts of the Grand Tour provide illuminating
detail and a first-hand perspective of the experience. Examining some accounts
offered by authors in their own lifetimes, Jeremy Black detects the element of
literary artifice in these and cautions that they should be approached as
travel literature rather than unvarnished accounts. He lists as examples Joseph
Addison, John Andrews, William Thomas Beckford, whose Dreams, Waking Thoughts,
and Incidents was a published account of his letters back home in 1780,
embellished with stream-of-consciousness associations, William Coxe, Elizabeth
Craven, John Moore, tutor to successive dukes of Hamilton, Samuel Jackson
Pratt, Tobias Smollett, Philip Thicknesse, and Arthur Young. Although Italy was
written as the "sink of iniquity," many travelers were not kept from
recording the activities they participated in or the people they met,
especially the women they encountered. To the Grand Tourists, Italy was an
unconventional country, for "The shameless women of Venice made it
unusual, in its own way.” Sir James Hall confided in his written diary to
comment on seeing "more handsome women this day than I ever saw in my
life," also noting "how flattering Venetian dress [was] — or perhaps
the lack of it." Eighteenth and nineteenth century Italian women, with
their unfamiliar methods and routines, were opposites to the western dress
expected of European women in the eighteenth and nineteenth century; their
"foreign" ways led to the documentation of encounters with them,
providing published accounts of the Grand Tour. Boswell courted noble ladies
and recorded his progress with his relationships, mentioning that Madame
Micheli "Talked of religion, philosophy… Kissed hand often." The
promiscuity of Boswell’s encounters with Italian elite are shared in his diary
and provide further detail on events that occurred during the Grand Tour.
Boswell notes "Yesterday morning with her. Pulled up petticoat and showed
whole knees… Touched with her goodness. All other liberties exquisite." He
describes his time with the Italian women he encounters and shares a part of
history in his written accounts. Lord Byron's letters to his mother with the
accounts of his travels have also been published. Byron spoke of his first
enduring Venetian love, his landlord’s wife, mentioning that he has
"fallen in love with a very pretty Venetian of two and twenty— with great
black eyes — she is married — and so am I — we have found & sworn an
eternal attachment … & I am more in love than ever . . . and I verily
believe we are one of the happiest unlawful couples on this side of the
Alps."Many tourists enjoyed sexual relations while abroad but to a great
extent were well behaved, such as Thomas Pelham, and scholars, such as Richard
Pococke, who wrote lengthy letters of their Grand Tour experiences.
Inventor
Sir Francis Ronalds’ journals and sketches of his 1818–20 tour to Europe and
the Near East have been published on the web.The letters written by sisters
Mary and Ida Saxton of Canton, Ohio in 1869 while on a six-month tour offer
insight into the Grand Tour tradition from an American perspective.
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