John Chetwode Eustace, Radical Catholicism, and the Travel Guidebook: The Classical Tour (1813) and Its Legacy

Abstract

John Chetwode Eustace, Radical Catholicism, and the Travel Guidebook: The Classical Tour (1813) and Its Legacy Alexandra Milsom (bio) Halfway through Charles dickens’s little dorrit, which was serialized between 1855 and 1857, there is a striking reference to “Mr. Eustace”: a writer, one would assume from the tone of this lengthy novel, whose reputation had been wholly discredited by midcentury. Immediately after Mr. Dorrit’s sudden accession to wealth and subsequent release from the Marshalsea debtor’s prison, his family embarks on a Grand Tour of the Continent. Mr. Dorrit has hired the well-named Mrs. General both to guide his family through the Continent in an aristocratic fashion and train his daughters Fanny and Amy (“Little”) Dorrit in the manners and habits of the prosperous classes to which they now belong. Mrs. General, in turn, looks to “Mr. Eustace” for information about the most significant tourist sites. According to the novel, she is representative of all tourists in her devotion to “Mr. Eustace”: “The whole body of travellers seemed to be a collection of voluntary human sacrifices, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to Mr. Eustace and his attendants, to have the entrails of their intellects arranged according to the taste of that sacred priesthood.”1 On this view, Dickens’s narrator suggests that “Mr. Eustace” is an authority whose words sanctify the ways in which Mrs. General directs the Dorrit family to think about the art and architecture that they witness abroad. The religious imagery of Dickens’s grotesque metaphor does not solely criticize the slavish devotion of uneducated tourists to their priestly guide. [End Page 219] John Chetwode Eustace (1762–1815), depicted in Little Dorrit as a cultish idol, was in fact an Irish priest who championed the cause of Catholic Emancipation. His most famous volume—usually called the Classical Tour (1813)—was reprinted many times through the first half of the century and, in its prescriptive route and didactic tidbits of cultural and historical information, one can recognize the origins of the modern tourist guidebook.2 Dickens’s modern reader, however, needs at least one extensive footnote to appreciate the political, and even anti-Catholic, implication of criticizing Eustace’s widely circulated volume. Embedded alongside its information about sites along the Grand Tour, Eustace’s Classical Tour presented a radical and extensive case for tolerance of Roman Catholics in Britain during a time of particularly heightened debate on the issue. Michael Tomko’s important study on the influence of Catholic politics upon British Romanticism reminds us that the so-called “Catholic question” “forced a disturbing, self-conscious re-examination of the foundations of British national identity at a contentious time of political upheaval in France and Ireland” and it played a “central role in how the romantics viewed themselves and of how we now view the romantics.”3 Although the title of Eustace’s book promises its reader information about a “Classical Tour”—referencing the traditional route that would be the capstone of an eighteenth-century gentleman’s Oxbridge education—the book’s detailed guidance of the Roman Catholic sites of Northern and Southern Italy recentered the tour upon the cultural practices of Italy’s contemporary inhabitants in the midst of this important era of religious self-scrutiny.4 In partial consequence of Eustace’s volume and the timing of its publication in the years that saw the birth of mass-tourism, the Victorian traveler’s voyage to Italy became a tour of the artwork and architecture of the medieval and Renaissance periods. All British guidebooks would follow Eustace’s lead in explaining the treasures of Roman Catholic Italy to a largely Protestant readership. [End Page 220] Dickens’s novel alerts us to the historical context that brought about this marked shift in British Continental tourism from classical to Catholic sites. Little Dorrit was published in the 1850s, but its action noticeably takes place in the 1820s (“[t]hirty years ago” are its opening words).5 During this particular decade, tourists from Britain were able to travel abroad for the first time in a whole generation, though not without considerable risk.6 Eustace’s original title points (misleadingly) to the book’s classical...