The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century/Chapter 1

by William Edward Mead

THE GRAND TOUR IN THE
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY

 

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTORY

 

It is hardly necessary to remark that extensive foreign travel was nothing new to Englishmen of the eighteenth century. Journeys to Rome were not uncommon in the time of Bede, and, as Chaucer incidentally remarks, the long and hazardous pilgrimage to Jerusalem was thrice accomplished by the Wife of Bath, who unquestionably had no lack of companions. Many women before the fourteenth century had actually made that journey. The pilgrimage to Compostella in Spain was made by vast throngs in the Middle Ages. Voyages of discovery in all parts of the world had already become common in the reign of Elizabeth. Migration to America took tens of thousands of colonists across the Atlantic in the seventeenth century.

In comparison with these perilous ocean voyages the tour of the Continent of Europe, though by no means easy or entirely free from danger, was a mere pleasure trip, and Englishmen of rank had long been accustomed to make it. Mr. Sidney Lee well says: "The value of foreign travel as a means of education was never better understood, in spite of rudimentary means of locomotion, than by the upper classes of Elizabethan England. All who drank deep of the new culture had seen the wonders of the world abroad."^[1] In another place he remarks: "Throughout the century young Englishmen of good family invariably completed their education in foreign travel and by attendance at a foreign university. In many quarters the practice was deemed to be perilous to the students' religion and morals. The foundation of Trinity College, Dublin, in 1592, was justified on the ground 'that many of our people have usually heretofore used to travel into France, Italy, and Spain, to get learning in such foreign universities, whereby they have been infected with popery and other ill qualities.'^[2] But the usage of youthful peregrination was barely affected by such suspicions. The young Englishman's educational tour often extended to Italy and Germany as well as to France, but France was rarely omitted, and many youths confined their excursions to French territory."^[3]

After the reign of Elizabeth the stream of travel to foreign parts, in spite of occasional interruption by Continental wars, continued to flow; and what came to be known as "the grand tour"^[4] attained in the eighteenth century a more widely diffused popularity than it had ever before known. Ever since the Renaissance the tide of travel — particularly to Italy — from various countries of Europe had ebbed and flowed. But in the eighteenth century what had been a few generations earlier a matter of extreme difficulty, and even danger, became relatively easy. Annoyance and privation might still be expected here and there, but not in sufficient measure to deter one in tolerable health from the undertaking.

This growing interest of Englishmen in foreign countries, especially France and Italy and the Low Countries, and, to some degree, Germany, was due to a multitude of causes: to the centering of attention upon the Continent by the War of the Spanish Succession and other conflicts, to the popularity of French fashions notwithstanding the traditional hostility to France, to the greater perfection of means of transportation, to the increase of foreign commerce, to the rapidly growing wealth and broadening outlook of Englishmen, and to the multitudinous attractions of the Continent — social, artistic, architectural, literary, historical — which were sufficient to draw tourists of every taste, whether for enlarging their stock of knowledge or for mere pleasure.

The grand tour was, at least in intention, not merely a pleasurable round of travel, but an indispensable form of education for young men in the higher ranks of society. When made in approved fashion, in the company of a competent tutor, the grand tour meant a carefully planned journey through France and Italy and a return journey through Germany and the Low Countries. It was commonly necessary, on the way to or from Italy, to cross a portion of Switzerland, or at least some of the mountains belonging to the Alpine chains, but this part of the journey, in so far as the mountains were concerned, was regarded as a disagreeable necessity. Such a tour usually required three years. Multitudes of independent travelers, unhampered by a tutor or by anything besides their ignorance, of course visited the Continent without attempting the conventional round, and many pupils traveling with a tutor spent no more than a year or two abroad, but the allowance of three years was not too long for a leisurely survey of the principal countries and for getting some practical acquaintance with foreign languages.

Those who traveled abroad belonged, as a rule, just as was the case in the sixteenth century, to a picked class, and with their aristocratic temper, their wealth, and their insular characteristics, they presented, along with marked individual differences, a well-defined tourist type. The traits of successive generations of English travelers upon the Continent were early combined to form the well-known Englishman of the Continental stage — a caricature, indeed, but one reproducing many features drawn from life. Even in our time the old type is not altogether extinct, and may be occasionally encountered in a railway carriage or at a mountain inn, but it is daily becoming more rare.

Our main theme is, then, the touring of Englishmen upon the Continent of Europe in the eighteenth century. Practical considerations of space, as well as the actual practice of all but an insignificant fraction of tourists, compel us to limit our view to France, Switzerland, Italy, Germany, the Low Countries. But this limitation has the advantage of permitting us to view in more detail the field that we undertake to survey.

We must not forget in any part of this discussion that not merely in England but throughout Europe the tutorial system was the generally approved method for the education of young men of quality, and that what was in all essentials the grand tour was made under the guidance of a traveling tutor by the scions of noble families of France, Germany, Holland, and other countries of Europe. Travel was regarded as an essential finish of one's education, whether one traveled alone or with a tutor. The fashion of travel once established, it often tempted men, and even women, of mature years to undertake extended journeys. The itinerary, of course, varied somewhat according to personal tastes and special needs, but in general the regions visited by tourists bom on the Continent were substantially the same as those that attracted Englishmen.

We see, then, that wide travel for education or for pleasure was in no sense peculiar to Englishmen, — although as a class they were best able to afford the expense, — but rather a conformity on their part to a practice that had become traditional among the upper classes of Europe — "that noble and ancient custom of traveling, a custom so visibly tending 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 to form the complete gentleman."^[5]

1. Great Englishmen of the Sixteenth Century, p. 71. Cf. also Gardner, Dukes and Poets of Ferrara, p. 413.
2. J. W. Stubbs, History of the University of Dublin (1889), p. 354.
3. S. Lee, The French Renaissance in England, pp. 42, 43.
4. The first instance of the use of the term recorded in the Oxford Dictionary is for the year 1670.
5. Nugent, Grand Tour, i, Preface, p. xi.