Fragments from the Grand Tour

Abstract

Tourism was one of the principal features of the relationship between the British elite and the Continent in the eighteenth century' and the century witnessed a substantial increase in the number of British men and women traveling abroad for pleasure. The principal motives advanced for foreign travel were that it equipped the traveler socially and provided him with useful knowledge and attainments. It was partly for these reasons that a surprising number of individuals spent part of their formal education abroad. There were social benefits for those who returned having been polished by Continental society, and snobbery helped to ensure that a returned tourist appeared part of a charmed, exotic world. The accounts left by tourists are very disparate. Despite contemporary criticisms that they stayed together excessively and were insufficiently perceptive, there is an astonishing variety in the written remains that such travelers left behind. Far from receiving the same images, storing the same memories, or sharing the same stock of historical commonplaces, many tourists left fresh and informed accounts of what interested them, whether agricultural methods or opera, court society or religious ceremonies. These accounts were often prefaced or concluded by observations on how the situation in Britain was better than any to be found abroad, but such remarks do not vitiate the interesting material that sometimes accompanied them. Hitherto most of the work on the Grand Tour has been based on printed sources, namely the accounts that tourists such as Joseph Addison, John Andrews, Williams Beckford, William Coxe, Elizabeth Craven, John Moore, Samuel Pratt, Tobias Smollett, Philip Thicknesse, and Arthur