Itineraries and expectations
Travel is everywhere in eighteenth-century British literature. The fictional lit- erature of the age ‘is full of travelling heroes enmeshed in journey-plots’, and ‘almost every author of consequence’ – among them Daniel Defoe, Joseph Addison, Henry Fielding, Tobias Smollett, Samuel Johnson, James Boswell, Laurence Sterne, Mary Wollstonecraft – ‘produced one overt travel book’. To these must be added the ‘numerous essayistic and philosophic performances’ that were cast in the form of imaginary travelogues, such as Jonathan Swift’s
Gulliver’s Travels (1726), Johnson’s Rasselas (1759), and Oliver Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World (1762). Writers seemed to be travelling, in reality or
in their imaginations, just about everywhere. Paul Fussell speculates that travel’s pervasive appeal may have owed something to the high degree of acceptance which philosophical empiricism had gained in Britain by the end of the seventeenth century. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Under-
standing (1690) became a sort of bible for those who espoused a ‘blank slate’
conception of human consciousness and held that all knowledge is produced from the ‘impressions’ drawn in through our five senses. If knowledge is rooted in experience and nowhere else, travel instantly gains in importance and desirability. Following the great Renaissance age of colonial exploration and expansion, an articulated, systematic empiricism made travelling about the world and seeing the new and different ‘something like an obligation for the person conscientious about developing the mind and accumulating knowledge’.1 Merely reading about conditions elsewhere was not enough.
Those who could travel, should – though of course precious few actually could.
These intriguing reflections treat travel in a very abstract way, as if one destination were neither more nor less valuable than another for stoking the knowledge engine inside us with the coal of ‘experience’. During the same period, though, a whole new paradigm for travelling came into existence
within Europe itself that was a good deal more forceful in specifying which were the desirable or even quasi-mandatory destinations where the proper
kind of experience was to be garnered. The history of travelling in Europe in
the period that runs, roughly, from the Restoration of the British monarchy in 1660 to the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837 is marked by the emergence of this new paradigm for travelling – that of the ‘Grand Tour’ – and concludes with the first glimmerings of another paradigm that absorbed and superseded it: that of mass tourism. The last sixty years or so of the period covered in this essay (1780–1840) witnessed the development of a new vocabulary for travel experience – that of ‘the picturesque’ – that profoundly affected the way travelling got done and written about, especially within Britain itself. The placing of the Continent effectively out of bounds to British travellers during the Napoleonic Wars from the early 1790s to 1815 gave a great fillip to inland travel and to the vogue of the picturesque. With the last fifteen years of this period (1825–40) came the rise of the railways and of a number of new businesses devoted to popularising leisure travel, at first within Britain but soon, inevitably, abroad as well.
Before embarking on a survey of this long era, it seems necessary to make two qualifications. First, we need to acknowledge that, although plenty of published books recount the experiences of travelling in Europe between 1660 and 1840, much of the relevant literature, especially on the Grand Tour, exists in private manuscript correspondence (some of it published posthu- mously), or in the form of arguments about the value of travelling, rather than that of travelogue.2Second, one must recognise that many other kinds
of journeys, undertaken by many sorts of people for many purposes, were going on; for the purposes of the present essay, these must be consigned to the margins of the still central tale of the Grand Tour and its aftermath. This essay will emphasise the framework of expectations and assumptions within which travel writing about Europe was produced between 1660 and 1840. In telling this story, one guiding question must be: what happened to the ideals and purposes associated with travel in Europe when they became (as it seemed) scandalously accessible to wider and wider swathes of the British population? How could the ideology of the Grand Tour survive in, or be altered to suit, the age of Thomas Cook and Son?
The Grand Tour was, from start to finish, an ideological exercise. Its lead- ing purpose was to round out the education of young men of the ruling classes by exposing them to the treasured artifacts and ennobling society of the Continent. Usually occurring just after completion of studies at Oxford or Cambridge University and running anywhere from one to five years in length, the Tour was a social ritual intended to prepare these young men to assume the leadership positions preordained for them at home. ‘Grand Tour’
began as a French phrase – le grand tour – but it was appropriated by Britons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries whose wealthy nation had created ‘a substantial upper class with enough money and leisure to travel’.3 In his An Italian Voyage (1670), Richard Lassels appears to have
introduced the term into English, recommending that young gentlemen un- dertake a ‘Grand Tour of France and the Giro of Italy’.4By the time it was
in full swing, the Tour had a more or less common itinerary that, allowing for minor divergences, may be summarised as follows. After crossing the Channel, the Tourist, having acquired a coach in Calais, would often pro- ceed to the Loire Valley, where the purest French accent was supposed to have its home, and where the young Briton could spend some time prepar- ing his tongue and his manner for the rigours of Paris society. A lengthy stay in the French capital might be followed by a visit to Geneva (and even, if one had the right connections, to Voltaire at his villa in the outskirts). One would then cross the Alps, as expeditiously as possible, proceeding via Turin or Milan down to Florence, to stay probably for some months. Venice might be next, then Rome, or vice versa. The Tourist might go as far as Naples. The return journey northward might include stays in Austria, the German university towns, Berlin, and Amsterdam. Sometimes the trip went the other way around, this latter arrangement having the advantage of saving what were seen as the more challenging parts of the travelling education – Italy and socially brilliant Paris – until later in the process. Proceeding in this direction, the rough-diamond young Tourist might be ‘rubbed at three of the consider- able courts of Europe – Berlin, Dresden, and Vienna’, before arriving in Italy ‘tolerably smooth and fit for the last polish’.5The most important destina-
tions, without which the entire enterprise would lose its purpose, were Paris and Italy (especially Rome, Florence, and Venice). The former was thought the natural habitat of the refined manners and gracious behaviour necessary to civilised men: as Lord Chesterfield put it in his famous letters of advice to his travelling teenage son, ‘It must be owned that the Graces do not seem to be natives of Great Britain . . . Since barbarism drove them out of Greece and Rome, they seem to have taken refuge in France’ (vol. i, p. 171). The latter was not only ‘Nature’s Darling’ to the visitor from colder northern lands, as Lassels called it (vol. i, p. 1), but the home of classical civilisation, both in its original (ancient Roman) and its recreated (Renaissance) manifestations. Several corollaries of the intended educative or preparatory function of the Grand Tour may be distinguished.
The first has to do with this classical tradition, by which eighteenth- century British travellers meant Rome, not Greece. As their overseas em- pire expanded, well-off Britons drew parallels between their nation’s current position and that of the ancient Roman Empire. They styled their age an
‘Augustan’ one and expected men of taste to admire and imitate Roman models. In his preface Lassels urged the tour upon the young nobleman in part because ‘no man understands Livy and Caesar’ so well as the one who has touched the ground they trod (vol. i, n. p.). Personal experience of the places made famous by the Latin texts which the traveller had read in school would seal the bond between ancient and modern empires. Since ‘[a]ll our re- ligion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above the savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean’, said Samuel Johnson in 1776, ‘[a] man who has not been to Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see’.6 Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy (1705) was for
many years a nearly indispensable handbook for those who went to visit the sites and monuments associated with the ancient Romans: indeed, so focused was it upon traces of classical times that the ‘Italy’ of its title can sometimes appear to be a land entirely lacking in living inhabitants or post-classical ed- ifices. What Addison and later British Augustans wanted to avoid, of course, was the colossal obstacle of the Roman Catholic Church: to Protestants it was the ‘Whore of Babylon’ whose corruptions had led Christians astray and under whose authority modern Rome had withered to a squalid, im- poverished town. As the eighteenth century progressed and the dangers of the Reformation period receded farther into the past, the fear and suspicion once felt by British Protestant visitors in Italy gave way to a rather satisfying savouring of the ‘pitiful contrast’ between current conditions and ‘the for- mer greatness of Rome . . . to which they felt themselves . . . the rightful and magnificent heirs’.7 Goldsmith’s poem The Traveller (1764), for instance,
directs the traveller-reader’s attention to
those domes, where Caesars once bore sway, Defac’d by time and tottering in decay, There in the ruin, heedless of the dead, The shelter-seeking peasant builds his shed . . .8
The British visitor would not be so heedless, but would take up the imperial banner from his fallen forerunner.
Touring might also prepare the young Englishman for his future r ˆole by of- fering him the opportunity not only to cultivate his historical consciousness and artistic tastes but actually to acquire works of art and antiquities that, displayed at home, would testify to the quality of his taste and surround him with objective confirmations of his self-worth. Travelling throughout Italy in 1613 with the artist Inigo Jones, the second Earl of Arundel more or less single-handedly initiated the large-scale acquisition of Italian antiquities for British collections: Arundel’s treasures gave English viewers their first
exposure to artworks made in classical times and in the Italian Renaissance; Jones came home to design the first Palladian or neoclassical buildings in England. In the early eighteenth century, figures like Richard Boyle (third Earl of Burlington), William Windham, and Thomas Coke (later first Earl of Leicester) followed Arundel’s example. Along with the education in art his- tory and in the principles of ‘correct taste’, Grand Tourists could amass ‘a good deal of cultural booty’ and build galleries where their accumu- lations might be shown more or less selectively to the rising number of ‘connoisseurs’.9 Furthermore, because the Grand Tourist was expected to
mingle with the social and political ´elite wherever he went, we must in- clude among the aims of the Grand Tour the cultivation of a certain trans- European class consciousness, a ‘horizontal’ identification that linked the superior classes of Britain with their counterparts on the Continent and imposed upon the traveller a sense that he shared with these counterparts a common responsibility for the welfare of Europe as a whole. The tour of Europe, its proponents held, could usher the unformed, insular young Englishman into that domain of good manners and educated tastes which transcended single nations. As Thomas Nugent put it, the Grand Tour tended ‘to enrich the mind with knowledge, to rectify the judgment, to remove the prejudices of education, to compose the outward manners, and in a word form the complete gentleman’.10
Finally, the training on offer in the Grand Tour could also involve some sowing of wild oats: removing its practitioner from the sphere of direct parental oversight between the ages of, say, sixteen and twenty, the tour provided a limited period of release before an adulthood in which the young man might be expected to set an example of responsibility and sobriety. While abroad, the privileged young voyager might hope to indulge in a series of ‘educative’, non-binding liaisons with foreign women of one social station or another. James Boswell’s diaries of his youthful travels in the early 1760s, for example, recount numerous episodes of such sexual opportunism.11
None of these aims was invented for the Grand Tour ex nihilo, and the young man making the journey was by no means expected to undertake all its obligations alone. Depending on the size of his purse, he might be accom- panied by a considerable number of servants, attendants, instructors, artists (to copy landscapes or ruins), and assorted hangers-on. At the very least he was expected to travel in company with a ‘governor’ or ‘bear-leader’. In his essay ‘Of Travel’ (1625), Francis Bacon had counselled that ‘young men [ought to] travel under some tutor or grave servant’ who ‘hath the language and hath been in the country before’. Without this vital assistance, the trav- eller would ‘go [about his journey] hooded, and look abroad little’.12 The
educated and prepared both to open his young charge’s eyes to the glories of antiquity and, when occasion demanded it, to act in loco parentis, insofar as his dependent status permitted him to do so. Such luminaries of post- Renaissance culture as Thomas Hobbes, Ben Jonson, Joseph Addison, and Adam Smith served as tutors early in their careers.
The Seven Years War (1756–63) interrupted British touring on the Continent, but the practice resumed with a vengeance after its conclusion. Perhaps because Grand Tour ideology like that stated by Richard Lassels or Thomas Nugent set impossibly high standards; perhaps because tutors failed to keep their charges in line; or perhaps because drinking, gaming, and whoring always held more attraction for the young traveller than did the other, more exalted objectives of the tour: for some combination of these reasons, the behaviour of Grand Tourists soon attracted sufficient criticism to call into question the aims of the entire enterprise. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu complained in 1758 that ‘the folly of British boys and [the] stu- pidity and knavery of [their] governors [had] gained us the glorious title of Golden Asses all over Italy’.13 Tobias Smollett echoed this opinion a few
years later when he remarked upon the ‘number of raw boys, whom Britain seemed to have poured forth on purpose to bring her national character into contempt’.14 In his epoch-making work of political economy, The
Wealth of Nations (1776), Adam Smith found the space to argue that the
typical travelling young man ‘commonly comes home more conceited, more unprincipled, more dissipated, and more incapable of any serious applica- tion . . . than he could well have become in so short a time had he lived at home’.15
Picturesqueness and sublimity
By the last third of the eighteenth century, the variety as well as the num- bers of Grand Tourists had steadily increased. No longer the preserve of ‘aristocratic male heirs’, the tour had started to come within the grasp of ‘less socially elevated and less well-educated people’ (Brewer, Pleasures, p. 632), including women and children travelling with their families. This gradual and very partial opening up of European travelling was disrupted by the French Revolution and by the twenty-odd years of nearly ceaseless conflict between France and Britain that followed it (c.1790–1815). A new vogue of domestic travel arose to fill this gap, impelled by several cultural currents that had been decades in the making.
At the battle of Culloden in 1746, the last significant Jacobite rebellion against the Hanoverian monarchs was decisively defeated, putting an end to any realistic threat that the Catholic, Scottish Stuarts might reimpose
themselves upon Britain. Looking back over the cultural developments of the subsequent half-century or so, it seems as if the demise of Jacobitism as a viable political force and the dissolution of many Celtic communities in the Highlands of Scotland made safe, and ushered in, new fascinations with the Celtic fringe of Great Britain and, a bit later, new ‘Gothic’ fantasies about the countries where the dark mysteries of Catholicism held sway. In 1760, James Macpherson published Fragments of Ancient Poetry, Collected
in the Highlands of Scotland . . . , the first of several volumes purporting to
present the lost works of Ossian and his father Fingal, bards of olden times. Controversy about the works’ authenticity raged for decades, but this only lent notoriety to Macpherson’s books and whetted the appetite of southern Scots and Englishmen to explore, in actual or in imaginary travels, the once- shunned landscapes of the Highlands. Even the inveterate Londoner Samuel Johnson, who denounced Macpherson’s works as frauds, was eager to visit the Scottish Highlands and Islands to see the ‘simplicity and wildness’ of ‘a system of life almost totally different’ from that of the civilised south.16
The famous man recorded his own alternately philosophic and irritated reac- tions to the 1773 tour in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland; James Boswell added his own more genial account in The Journal of a Tour to the
Hebrides. Dr Johnson’s verdict on Mull may stand for many similar judg-
ments rendered throughout his text: Mull appeared to the Sage of London as a place without culture, ‘where the climate is unkind, and the ground penurious, . . . where life unimproved, and unadorned, fades into something little more than naked existence’.17 For many others, though, the barren,
forbidding, and ominous character of the region, newly ‘permeated by the spirits of Fingal and Ossian’, became part of the attraction.18
Whereas the Continental Grand Tourist before this period had favoured fertile, gentle landscapes, the Ossianic pilgrims were drawn to mist, moun- tains, and waterfalls, and their new enthusiasm was beginning to be shared by travellers to other Celtic fringe regions of Britain, such as North Wales, as well as by travellers through Switzerland. Traversing the Alps had been a necessary tribulation for the privileged young man en route to Italy: he would hire a team of voiturins to transport his carriage and luggage and have himself carried across in a chair called an ‘Alps machine’ – perhaps even shutting his