Abstract
For much of the eighteenth century, young Britons of a certain class regarded continental travel as a way of completing their education.1 A visit to Europe, especially with the exotic pleasures and greater cultural appreciation it was presumed to bestow, gave a gloss of sophistication and maturity to their lives.2 Indeed, many focussed almost exclusively on this view of travel, believing themselves engaged in a self-fashioning exercise, an effort intended to bring the references and allusions gleaned from a classical education to life. Some learned languages, engaged meaningfully with different cultures, and improved their appreciation of the arts, although much of what they absorbed was predetermined, stemming as it did from a very definite set of geographical coordinates. Nevertheless, to partake in the Grand Tour of Europe was esteemed one of the most worthy of pursuits, and many well-known figures — Adam Smith, Tobias Smollett and Lawrence Sterne, for example — made trips to the centres of continental culture. They visited the Italian cities of Siena, Florence, Venice and Rome, but also southern venues such as Puglia, and for the hardier tourist, Sicily.3 France, too, as well as parts of middle and northern Europe drew an enthusiastic response, with Paris and Versailles, Amsterdam and Vienna, becoming increasingly popular.
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Notes
While the age profile of travellers may have varied somewhat, the relative youthfulness of many is noted by several critics. For example, James Buzzard quotes Lady Montague, who writes of ‘the folly of British boys … all over Italy’, while Barbara Korte suggests that ‘The intention of the Grand Tour was to add — after the traveller’s student years — the finishing touches to his education and the process of his socialization. Originally, it had also been a part of the courtier’s professional training, preparing him for a career in a political, or more commonly, diplomatic office.’ However, such a profile was less coherent as time passed; Katherine Turner notes the increasing numbers of travellers who were accompanied by ‘wives, families and colleagues’. J. Buzzard, ‘The Grand Tour and After (1660–1840)’, in P. Hulme and T. Youngs, eds, The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 42;
B. Korte, English Travel Writing: From Pilgrimages to Postcolonial Explorations (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), p. 42;
K. Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe 1750–1800 (Aldershot: Ashgate Press, 2001), p. 25.
‘Grand tourism has its origins in the relationship of parvenu to aristocrat. Its development follows a shift in the focus of culture and of economic and political power. The wealthy and educated, of states whose position of dominance in the world is comparatively new, visit countries that have passed their peak of prestige and creativity but are still venerated for historic and cultural reasons. Thus Romans visited Greece and the eastern Mediterranean; the English, from the sixteenth century onwards, visited Italy.’ L. Turner and J. Ash, The Golden Hordes: International Tourism and the Pleasure Periphery (London: Constable, 1975), p. 29.
R. Hudson, ed., The Grand Tour, 1592–1796 (London: Folio, 1993), p. 14.
M. Andrews, The Search for the Picturesque: Landscape Aesthetics and Tourism in Britain, 1760–1800 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1989), p. 4.
L. Doyle, ‘The Racial Sublime’, in A. Richardson and S. Hofkosh, eds, Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996), p. 16.
T. O. McLoughlin and J. Boulton, eds, The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997), vol. I, p. 186. Burke’s theories, of course, were variously adapted. See F. MacDonald, ‘St Kilda and the Sublime’, Ecumene, 8:2 (2001), who highlights the way in which Burkean aesthetics were intensified for many travellers by the publication of James Macpherson’s Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected in the Highlands of Scotland (1760).
J. R. Gold and M. M. Gold, Imagining Scotland: Tradition, Representation and Promotion in Scottish Tourism since 1750 (Aldershot: Scolar, 1995), p. 39.
M. Beames, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Brighton: Harvester, 1983), p. 24.
D. Dickson, New Foundations: Ireland 1660–1800 (Dublin: Irish Academic Press, 2000), p. 148.
I. Ousby, The Englishman’s England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), p. 9.
‘Whiteboyism first appeared in the winter of 1761–2 in the counties of Tipperary, Cork, Limerick and Waterford. In spite of the repressive measures taken by the authorities, it was able to establish itself as an almost permanent feature of the Munster rural scene resurging in particular years with fresh momentum and intensity. Its peak years before 1800 were 1762, 1775 and 1786.’ M. Beames, Peasants and Power: The Whiteboy Movements and Their Control in Pre-Famine Ireland (Sussex: Harvester, 1983), pp. 25–6.
J. Duncan and D. Gregory, ‘Introduction’, in J. Duncan and D. Gregory, eds, Writes of Passage: Reading Travel Writing (London: Routledge, 1999), p. 5.
J. Black, The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Thrupp: Sandpiper, 1992), p. 5.
T. Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), p. 12.
T. Furniss, Edmund Burke’s Aesthetic Ideology: Language, Gender, and Political Economy in Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 73.
Although W. Nolan refers to (early nineteenth-century) Wicklow as ‘an escape, a place of seclusion where the natural world could be dramatized in a rural setting’, and as an ‘elusive entity’, he also notes how its proximity ‘to Dublin may have stunted [its …] urban growth’. W. Nolan, ‘Land and Landscape in County Wicklow c. 1840’, in K. Hannigan and W. Nolan, eds, Wicklow: History and Society (Dublin: Geography Publications, 1994), pp. 650, 652, 687.
M. Andrews, The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents, vol. I (Mountfield: Helm, 1994), p. 9.
See K. Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism: The Romantic Novel and the British Empire (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1997) for further analysis of the bog, including its contribution to early nineteenth-century nationalist fiction (where ‘even the bog undergoes a complete rehabilitaton’, p. 46), pp. 37–66.
L. Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750–1915 (London: Aurum, 1997), p. 46. For its time, however, Defoe’s account was a nevertheless thorough undertaking: ‘The preparations for this work have been suitable to the author’s earnest concern for its usefulness; seventeen very large circuits, or journeys have been taken thro’ divers parts separately, and three general tours over almost the whole English part of the Island.’
D. Defoe, A Tour Thro’ the Whole Island of Great Britain (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1991), The Author’s Preface.
J. Brown, ‘A Description of the Lake at Keswick’ (c. 1753), in M. Andrews, ed., The Picturesque: Literary Sources and Documents, vol. I (Robertsbridge: Helm, 1994), p. 76.
Cited in L. Fleming and A. Gore, The English Garden (London: Michael Joseph, 1979), p. 118.
K. M. Davies, ‘For Health and Pleasure in the British Fashion: Bray, Co. Wicklow, as a Tourist Resort, 1750–1914’, in B. O’ Connor and M. Cronin, eds, Tourism in Ireland: A Critical Analysis (Cork: Cork University Press, 1993), p. 32.
C. Aitchison, N. E. Macleod and S. J. Shaw, eds, Leisure and Tourism Landscape: Social and Cultural Geographies (London: Routledge, 2000), p. 34.
R. Cardinal, ‘Romantic Travel’, in R. Porter, ed., Rewriting the Self: Histories from the Renaissance to the Present (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 144.
W. Hogarth, The Analysis of Beauty, ed., R. Paulson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1997), p. 88.
T. Williamson, Polite Landscapes: Gardens and Society in Eighteenth-Century England (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 77.
S. Mills, ‘Written on the Landscape: Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark’, in A. Gilroy, ed., Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel 1775–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), p. 27.
F. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), p. 95.
Chloe Chard makes the interesting observation that although seventeenth-century European travel emphasised ‘manly self-reliance’, later travellers developed a more varied repertoire of responses: ‘Late eighteenth-century travel writing [to Continental Europe], then, both incorporates expressions of responsiveness that are defined as feminized and presents some of the feminizing effects of travel as legitimate and desirable.’ C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography 1600–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), pp. 36–7.
For a useful discussion of Grant, see B. Hagglund, ‘“Not absolutely a native, nor entirely a stranger”: The Journeys of Anne Grant’, in G. Hooper and T. Youngs, eds, Perspectives on Travel Writing (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004).
G. E. Mingay, ed., Arthur Young and His Times (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1975), p. 4.
Later editions include the abridged Arthur Young, Tour in Ireland, ed., C. Maxwell (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1925, reprinted Belfast: Blackstaff, 1983), and a reprint of Wollaston Hutton’s edition, with a short introductory essay by J. B. Ruane (Shannon: Irish University Press, 1970).
A. Young, Tour in Ireland, 1776–1779, ed., A. Wollaston Hutton, vol. I (London: Bell, 1892), p. x.
‘I kept a private journal throughout the whole of this tour, in which I minuted many anecdotes and circumstances which occurred to me of a private nature, descriptive of the manners of the people, which, had it been preserved, would have assisted greatly in drawing up these papers; but, unfortunately, it was lost […] On returning to England, I quitted my whisky [a light carriage built for rapid transport] at Bath, and got into a stage, and sent a new London servant, the only one I had, thither to bring the horse and chaise to London, and the trunk containing these things. The fellow was a rascal, stole the trunk, and pretended that he had lost it on the road.’ A. Young, The Autobiography, ed., M. Betham-Edwards (London: Smith, 1898), pp. 68–9.
‘This was the year [1767] of the first of Arthur Young’s tours of Great Britain, which combined sober attention to crops, prices, and farming methods with rhapsody over scenery: a most unlikely combination, but obviously fashionable or the young man would not have made it.’ G. B. Parks, ‘The Turn to the Romantic in the Travel Literature of the Eighteeenth Century’, Modern Language Quarterly, 25 (1964), p. 29.
‘The picturesque was established by Uvedale Price as a third term to be set beside the others [the sublime and the beautiful], but it proved to be an unstable term.’ M. Price, ‘The Picturesque Moment’, in F. W. Hillis and H. Bloom, eds, From Sensibility to Romanticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1965), p. 262.
J. Whale, ‘Romantics, Explorers and Picturesque Travellers’, in S. Copley and P. Garside, eds, The Politics of the Picturesque: Literature, Landscape and Aesthetics since 1770 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), p. 176.
D. Cosgrove and S. Daniels, The Iconography of Landscape: Essays on the Symbolic Representation, Design, and Use of Past Environments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 13.
T. Fulford, Landscape, Liberty and Authority: Poetry, Criticism and Politics from Thomson to Wordsworth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 2–3.
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© 2005 Glenn Hooper
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Hooper, G. (2005). From Grand Tour to Home Tour, 1760–1800. In: Travel Writing and Ireland, 1760–1860. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230510814_2
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