Towards a History of Children and Heritage: Young People, Heritage Education and the Eighteenth-Century ‘Grand Tour’

Abstract

ABSTRACT Young people are now at the centre of what we call “heritage”. Children are a familiar sight at heritage sites, where specific provision is made for their learning and entertainment. Heritage education is also now well established, with families, schools, heritage sites and agencies working to ensure that children are encouraged and supported to engage with the material remains of the past. However, this is a surprisingly recent development. It was only in the later twentieth century that children came to be recognised as an important market for the heritage industry, requiring special consideration and amenities. On the other hand, on an individual basis, many children have been active participants in heritage activities for much longer. This essay considers one aspect of that long history, looking at the presence of children on the “Grand Tour” in the long eighteenth century. The classic image of the Grand Tour is of young British men being sent, in the years following school or university, on a protracted, often debauched journey around Western Europe. This characterisation has been recently challenged in several ways, and this essay continues this reevaluation by investigating the Tourists' age. Some Tourists were mature adults; many others were surprisingly young. This essay investigates both those young people who undertook their own tours, often accompanied by a tutor, and those touring as part of a family group. No reliable corpus of Grand Tourists can be established, and in those directories that do exist, children tend to be underrepresented. But using a range of printed, manuscript and visual sources, including educational treatises, memoirs, diaries, letters, and portraits, this essay establishes the unexpected extent of children's presence on the Tour and shows that it is possible to recapture the experiences of Grand Tour children and of those who travelled with them.