Paths to the Self

Abstract

The Early Modern period was not only the age of the explorer; it also saw the Humanist leaning towards Old and New Learning and the resulting educational reform. In this context, travel as a part of education emerges — a purpose hitherto uncommon except for the scholar’s peregrination to European universities. A type of journey associated with a particular value for the traveller’s formal education and his personal development was the Grand Tour: a social institution which took English travellers to certain countries of the Continent, particularly France and Italy, but also Germany, the Low Countries and Switzerland.¹ Italy — as the origin of European culture and civilization — was generally considered the highlight of the journey, not only during the Humanist period. In the slightly mocking words of Dr Johnson, who deeply regretted never having been to Italy himself, ‘[a] man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see.’² In the eighteenth century, particularly during the Enlightenment, the educational journey was widely practised and avidly discussed, as for instance in the chapter on travel of Rousseau’s influential didactic novel, Emile (1762). The universalist, pan-European spirit of the Enlightenment fostered travel as a means of edification, and the Grand Tour saw its heyday after the Peace of Utrecht (1713–14) which concluded the War of the Spanish Succession.

[1] I was imbarked at Dover, about tenne of the docke in the morning, the fourteenth of may, being Saturday and Whitsuneve, Anno 1608, and arrived in Calais (which Caesar calleth Ictius portus, a maritime towne of that part of Picardy, which is commonly called le pais reconquis; that is, the recovered Province, inhabited in former times by the ancient Morini.) about five of the clocke in the afternoone, after I had varnished the exterior parts of the ship with the excrementall ebullitions of my tumultuous stomach, as desiring to satiate the gormandizing paunches of the hungry Haddocks … with that wherewith I had superfluously stuffed my selfe at land, having made my rumbling belly their capacious aumbrie.

(Thomas Coryat, Coryats Crudities, 1611, p. 152)

[2] My time [in Bologna] then has been past thus — every morning from about ten to two I have been employed in seeing pictures, churches, and palaces — then I’d up to go to the Marshal’s. He generally contrives to have some one of learning or merit at dinner. I stay there till between 6 and 7. Then a Marquis Morini … comes by the order of the Countess to attend me to some conversation or assembly. There I meet her, and play at loo or primiera very low a couple of hours, then I go home write my journal or notes critical in the margins of my books of painting etc[.] and go to bed. I have besides this an hour in the morning for the same employment.

(Letter of Rev. Norton Nicholls, 1771, cited in Black, 1991, p. 39)

[3] Thus the whole circle of travellers may be reduced to the following Heads.

Idle Travellers,

Inquisitive Travellers,

Lying Travellers,

Proud Travellers,

Vain Travellers,

Splenetic Travellers.

Then follow the Travellers of Necessity,

The delinquent and felonious Traveller,

The unfortunate and innocent Traveller,

The simple Traveller,

And last of all (if you please) The Sentimental Traveller (meaning thereby myself).

(Laurence Sterne, A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, 1768, p. 15)