5. Dogs, servants and masculinities: writing about danger and emotion on the Grand Tour^*

This book has continually emphasized the practices, rationales and manly ideals that informed the Grand Tour’s culture of encountering danger. In this final chapter the focus shifts to consider the rhetorical ways by which Tourists represented their embodied physical, mental and emotional responses to danger in written accounts. Letters, diaries and memoirs were carefully crafted, widely circulated tools that aided in the construction of the self to a wider audience.¹ This chapter also returns to the premise established in the Introduction, that the Grand Tour contained several elite masculine identities. In their letters, diaries and memoirs, Grand Tourists creatively used their encounters with, responses to, and narratives of danger to construct individual claims to this variety of masculine identities which ranged from a hardy masculinity to others based on fashion, sensibility and literature. These narratives were also used to affirm ongoing collective elite assertions of social superiority, emotional hegemony and fitness for leadership.

Chapter 1 outlined how the concept of danger comprises three areas: the physical, empirical reality of being in danger; the perception and assessment of risk prior to the event; and the retrospective processing and communicating of emotional and physical reactions to danger. This chapter focuses on the third area. As Joanna Bourke observed, the very process of speaking and writing about emotions is an act of memory. Individuals writing about feeling afraid record the memory of that feeling rather than the actual experience of it. This process of parsing a memory and fitting it into certain narratives changes the construction and the sensation of that emotion, to the extent that it alters how the individual feels – and remembers feeling – about an event.² Clare Brant has noted that letter (and journal and memoir) writing formed an important part of the eighteenth-century travel experience in allowing travellers to visibly order their experience into acceptable cultural forms.³ The eighteenth-century practice of writing about such perilous encounters can therefore be considered a process of reaction to danger that was also an important part of fully benefiting from the transformative properties that danger supposedly held for elite men.

Studying masculinity and travel through the lens of danger provides the opportunity to consider the physical and emotional responses stimulated by situations of peril. This included fear, terror, relief, thrill and, perhaps most intriguingly, the absence of any emotional reaction at all. By exploring how the emotional components of the original experience and its subsequent narration were marshalled and controlled, insights may be gained, first, into whether emotions were deemed an important part of eighteenth-century masculinity and, second, the ways in which Tourists may have struggled to match their lived reality with the manly standards desired and demanded of them. In doing so, it is useful to consider the Grand Tour in the light of the historian William Reddy’s concept of emotional regimes. Reddy viewed emotions in terms of control/resistance and valid/invalid forms of emotional expression and experience. He argued that regimes of power create corresponding normative orders for emotions. Strict emotional regimes require individuals to express normative emotions and avoid deviant ones, while more relaxed regimes offer a degree of emotional navigation and freedom.⁴ As an institution devoted to training young men in elite masculine norms with public and private discourses that often constructed, prescribed or punished certain emotional reactions, the Tour was part of the apparatus that upheld the emotional regime of eighteenth-century British elite maleness.⁵ The emotional conventions surrounding narratives of danger were a central but extremely complex part of this.

For example, young elite men on the Grand Tour frequently wished to present an identity of hardy masculinity in response to danger. This expression sought to demonstrate internal virtues of courage and stoical self-control through physically demanding and observable performance. When reporting on these experiences, Tourists and tutors had to demonstrate their willingness to encounter danger and their courageous retention of physical and emotional self-control and hardiness. Emotions such as fear therefore had to be carefully negotiated. Prior to the advent of sensibility, troublesome emotions could simply be omitted from Grand Tour narratives, but the emerging mid-century culture of sensibility made representing emotion an increasingly challenging task. By the late century, this sort of omission was no longer acceptable. As true courage became associated with those who felt fear but proceeded regardless, Tourists were expected to demonstrate a suitably refined sensibility to danger while also avoiding direct discussions of personal fear.

Wrestling with a vocabulary that remained ill-equipped for this task, Grand Tourists turned, among other things, to discussion of the behaviour of their servants and dogs. According to their masters, neither enjoyed good fortune or conducted themselves particularly well on the Grand Tour. Throughout the eighteenth century, letters, journals and publications reported tearful servants trembling at danger and hapless dogs plummeting off cliffs. Through this, dogs and servants played a crucial function in the narratives of danger constructed by their masters. While dogs acted as extensions of the self, through which emotions of fear and concern could be indulged, servants were often framed as emotionally uncontrolled counterparts, against whom the Grand Tourist laid claim to superior abilities of courage and self-control.

Grand Tourists who wished to portray themselves as hardy men sought to conform to expected emotional standards by sidelining, reconstructing and reallocating inappropriate emotional responses; but did these unwanted reactions ever become uncontainable? The chapter ends with a consideration of this question and an analysis of how Grand Tourists, tutors and their families carved out spaces for exploring safely these involuntary, messier emotions of fear, distress and concern. By highlighting moments of seemingly irreconcilable tension between the ideals and lived realities of the Grand Tour, this chapter begins to consider the different ways in which the experience and performance of elite eighteenth-century masculinity and danger were internalized.

The fearful and fearless narrative

Grand Tourists and tutors who wished to construct a hardy masculine identity were faced with a set of narrative conundrums. The whole premise of tough and martial masculinity rested on having a favourable reaction when confronted with danger. On such occasions Tourists were required to convey that they had willingly faced and benefited from an objectively dangerous situation. But they also had to show that they had not acted foolishly or needlessly pursued this hazard. These requirements were intended to refute accusations of two longstanding threats to young men’s claim to masculinity – foolishness and immaturity – and also to provide reassurances to their families. Striking this balance appears to have been easier for Tourists in the early decades of the century, when expressions of emotional sensitivity were considered less significant. William Windham’s 1744 account of the Common Room’s glacier expedition, for example, communicated the group’s brave and rational approach to danger simply by narrating their actions and accompanying virtues. Emotional reactions had little place within the narrative. Windham avoided mentioning any negative reactions and only vaguely alluded to a favourable emotional response by brief references to pleasure, curiosity and cheerfulness.

By the 1750s, however, men writing about danger increasingly faced the challenge of accommodating sensibility within established forms of masculine identity. Disseminated through literature, drama and images, the cult of sensibility encouraged the expression and physical display of deeply felt emotion in men and women alike. Those who demonstrated a capacity for feeling, it was argued, also demonstrated a capacity for nobility. This in turn validated a new form of admirable masculinity – the man of feeling – who placed greater importance on gentlemen’s displays of emotional sensitivity. As Yuval Harari has argued in relation to battlefield narratives, the necessity of making claims to sensibility and refined nerves had a significant impact on narrations of danger. Harari indicated that as sensibility gave rise to sensationalist theories of knowledge, bodily and emotional experiences gained ascendancy over those of the mind.⁶ Prior to this, there was ‘little to be gained from experiencing fear and bodily weakness. Someone who felt fear and managed to suppress it had a strong mind, but someone who felt no fear at all had an even stronger mind’. Accordingly, ‘most men preferred to present themselves as completely fearless, and did not admit even to successful inner struggles against fear’.⁷ But with the rise of sensibility, ‘Courage and honour now depended on inner sensations and emotions of fear. A man was honourable because he felt fearful sensations and emotions, yet acted bravely’, while also retaining the strength not to be overcome by such sensations.⁸

As such, courageous approaches to danger could no longer be conveyed through an absence of emotional description. During the War of American Independence, and French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, the officer ranks enforced an emotional hierarchy in which they remained the most able to control their emotions, but also appropriated to themselves sensibility and emotional capacity as a marker of elite status.⁹ By contrast, exhibitions of extreme bravery among the ranks could be dismissed as insensible, animalistic courage since real bravery acted despite fear, not in ignorance of it. As one early nineteenth-century officer recalled in an autobiographical text from the 1820s, the rank and file ‘may, by possibility, have the courage of a lion, but he cannot possess the feelings of a man’.¹⁰ A similar narrative shift took place in late eighteenth-century Grand Tour writings. By the close of the century young elite men were required to demonstrate a complex blend of masculine attributes while on Tour: stoic pleasure in danger, a capacity for emotional control and enough sensibility to feel danger, all without giving the impression that this heightened sensitivity was in any way indicative of cowardice.

Conveying any sense of pleasure, enjoyment or thrill was equally challenging. As discussed in chapter 1, eighteenth-century understandings of terms like danger, risk, hazard and peril were entwined with the concept of chance. Used alone, they referenced situations in which either a negative or positive outcome was possible. Grand Tourists who wished to show that their experience of danger had been negative could draw on a well-established emotional terminology of ‘fear’, ‘dread’, ‘fright’, ‘alarm’, ‘trepidation’, ‘consternation’ and ‘unease’. In contrast, much of the vocabulary that might be used today to describe positive encounters with danger was still evolving. Cheerfulness was, as chapter 3 explored, commonly deployed to indicate pleasure in wholesome hardships, but descriptions of more intense emotional responses were difficult to establish. Terms like ‘adrenalin’ only appeared in late nineteenth-century medical texts, and were not used in relation to excitement until the early twentieth century.¹¹ ‘Exhilarate’ had a long association with the emotions of cheerfulness and joy but was not linked with physical thrill until well after the eighteenth century.¹² Other key terms were often emotionally neutral in meaning. For example, the terms ‘thrill’ (originally used to describe rending or tearing something) and ‘excitement’ were only linked with emotions through the late seventeenth-century medical theory of nervous systems. Even then, an unequivocal link between ‘thrill’, ‘excitement’ and pleasurable sensations was not established until the turn of the nineteenth century.¹³ The Romantic poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, provided an early instance of this emerging understanding and use. Writing in 1802, he described a dangerous descent of Scafell Pike in the Lake District as having resulted in a physical, emotion and spiritual experience that mingled pleasure, exhilaration and fear.¹⁴

In contrast, any eighteenth-century Grand Tourists or tutor using these terms had to work hard to ensure readers understood that these sensations were associated with pleasure. Writing in 1789, for example, the Revd William Coxe attempted to capture the exhilaration of a fast boat ride down the river Limmar with his pupil George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke. Coxe described how they had travelled ‘at a rate of six, eight, and sometimes even ten miles in the hour’, with ‘such velocity’ and ‘the greatest rapidity’. Focusing on the physical sensations of the experience, he highlighted the ‘violence’ of the water ‘beating against the boat’, and how ‘our vessel passed within a few inches of the shelving rocks, and was only prevented from striking against them by the dexterity of the pilot’.¹⁵ By stressing that he and the rest of the ‘Triumvirate’ had ‘disembarked highly delighted with our expedition’, Coxe tried to emphasize that this fast, physical experience of danger had produced a pleasurable thrill, rather than fear.¹⁶ Descriptions like these required an enormous amount of effort and were consequently rather unusual. As such, even in late eighteenth-century narratives of danger, Tourists and tutors found themselves unable to express easily their emotional and physical responses in a manner that reliably conveyed courage and pleasure.

Tourists and tutors therefore typically continued the earlier practice of muting or omitting overly emotional commentaries in their travel narratives. This approach had its advantages. As Susan Fitzmaurice has noted, the process of reading meaning into the familiar letter relied upon anticipated, interpretative exchanges between writer and recipient.¹⁷ In maintaining an emotional silence and dispassionate narrative, the Tourist created a vacuum into which their readers (parents, friends, society) were required to recreate the desired stoicism, courage and sensibility. The reality of Tourists’ emotional experience became irrelevant as responses were recast and rewritten to conform to expected modes of correspondence. In ensuring that their readers drew the correct conclusions about their emotional state, Grand Tourists deployed three principal strategies: the objective observational reporting of facts and measurements; the construction of fearful ‘others’ in the form of servants; and the less common acknowledgement of the fearless servant. The resulting narratives were used to support claims to individual and collective elite power through assertions of a hegemony of emotion, reason and self-control. By the late eighteenth century, this narrative had become even more complex as it was also required to include an appreciation of sensibility.

Grand Tourists drew on their role as gentlemen of science to create a heightened sense of danger through relaying intimidating facts and measurements. For example, in reporting that a hailstone of nearly ‘two inches in circumference’ had smashed ‘just before my horse’s feet’ in 1778, Lord Lewisham sharpened his reader’s understanding of just how dangerous the summer storm outside of Basle had been.¹⁸ In 1763 John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, took a boat trip along the top of the Schaffhausen falls. Now known as the Rhine Falls, this is Europe’s largest waterfall. In his letters, he made it clear that this was a dangerous activity by describing how the Rhine was as strong and wide as the Thames, and that the fall was over seventy feet high. Holroyd’s boat trip was completed safely, but a tragedy had occurred ‘not long’ before when ‘a Boat with 18 persons was forced down the Fall. Two were saved’.¹⁹ In this dispassionate report, Holroyd objectively established a precedent of danger and indicated how he had fearlessly undertaken an activity that could have resulted in his death.

Grand Tourists also sought to demonstrate that these dangers did indeed engender uncontrollably fearful reactions – just not in themselves or their tutors. This was achieved through the construction of fearful ‘others’, frequently in the figure of servants who accompanied their party. These servants embodied the emotional reactions that might be felt in dangerous circumstances, but with which Tourists were unable or unwilling to directly associate. In his Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (1779), William Coxe dramatically deployed this approach when describing the Alpine expedition of Lord Herbert:

Coxe described a man emotionally, verbally and physically out of control as panic ‘seized’ him, leaving him unable to move without ‘assistance’ or control his voice. Coxe’s narrative, which highlights that he himself had already crossed the precipice, strongly emphasizes that without the cooler heads of his social superiors, the servant would have been unable to survive his panic.

Coxe used the strategy of the fearful ‘other’ throughout his publications, most notably in describing their near-shipwreck in the icy Gulf of Bothnia which he included in Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784). This description included a rare direct reference to his own emotional state and those of his aristocratic student, Lord Herbert, and Captain John Floyd. The trio were ‘seriously alarmed’, but their reaction was contained when compared to that of the sailors who ‘were so terrified that they cried’.²¹ While the crew was incapacitated, Herbert and his tutors became increasingly active, establishing mastery over fear and, by extension, mastery over themselves and others. As Coxe put it:

Coxe’s intensely physical narrative highlighted an enthusiastic display of leadership and the unmistakable masculine endurance of his party directly linked with survival and rooted in the physical body. In ‘a crazy open fishing boat’ with a ‘wholly inexperienced’ crew and, apparently, no ship’s captain, Coxe’s ‘we’ was implicitly associated with himself, Herbert and Floyd. In this narrative, the fearful crew were a crucial narrative foil against which the trio’s superior virtues and capacity for self-control could be manifested.

These discourses offered an ideal first opportunity for elite young men to advocate personal claims towards their innate abilities of superior self-control and, by extension, their right to command others of lesser status. In casting servants and locals as the emotionally uncontrolled ‘other’ in their discourses on danger, Grand Tourists and their tutors took an active part in a wider ongoing reinforcement of emotional hierarchies. Here, the lower social orders were also characterized as either emotionally uncontrolled or brute-like in their insensitivity. Eighteenth-century views of servants, for example, oscillated between an indulgent paternalistic view of their ‘childlike’ qualities and a fearful recognition of the need to regulate their more uncontrollable natures.²³ Similarly, military officers perceived their men as ‘coarse creatures, devoid of the finer qualities of mind and intellect, and full of brutal urges and peasant’s cunning’.²⁴ Without the presence and superior qualities of elite men, officers believed that their men would be incapable of controlling themselves in the face of danger.²⁵ In these discourses, the emotional reactions of lower social groups were used against them regardless of their approach. If they expressed emotion, they were castigated as uncontrolled and met with the assertion that ‘Those subject to passion deserve to be subject to power’. ²⁶ If they accepted their lot, they lacked emotional capacity and a desire for freedom.²⁷ Elite claims to a hegemony of emotion and reason were therefore integral to broader assertions of political and social-cultural dominance.²⁸

Telling stories and jokes about one’s servants was a common means of asserting and justifying social dominance, and a popular trope among a wide range of eighteenth-century elite travellers.²⁹ During her travels with her Italian husband in the 1780s, Hester Piozzi described a violent storm in Italy during which her English maid and French valet ‘became quite unsupportable to themselves and me; who could only repeat the same unheeded consolations’.³⁰ In 1716–17, when crossing Europe with her husband to take up his diplomatic posting in Constantinople, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu did not limit herself to targeting servants, choosing to allocate men and women closer to her own rank to the role of emotional ‘other’. She described, for example, how her husband ‘was much more surpriz’d than myselfe’ when they realized that their postilions were falling asleep while galloping along the moonlit precipices between Bohemia and Saxony.³¹ During a stormy channel crossing back to England in 1718, she mocked the fears of ‘a fellow passenger … an English Lady’: ‘I was not at all willing to be drown’d, [but] I could not forbear being entertain’d at [her] double distress’ at possibly losing her life and her fine headdress.³²

Elite men did not have the same freedom. Constrained by a shared masculine code of honour which forbade them from making false accusations of cowardice, Tourists had to be careful when casting their peers and social equivalents as emotional subordinates. This was possible in certain circumstances. In October 1776, for example, Lewisham wrote to his mother to describe his descent into a Hungarian mine one hundred fathoms deep using ladders and ropes. Here he sought to demonstrate the bravery of his actions by contrasting them with the conduct of Charles, his younger brother, ‘who is prudence itself [and] would not go down’.³³ This gentle mockery was perhaps only possible because Charles was his little brother. However, when socially superior men did cast their peers as emotional subordinates, it was generally intended as a deliberate insult to someone’s masculinity and leadership abilities. This most frequently occurred when Tourists criticized the Italian elite. Writing from Florence in 1729, Stephen Fox, 1st earl of Ilchester, described a violent earthquake which was ‘a much more terrible thing than I imagined’. The local reaction was one of hysteria, escalating towards ‘universal fright’.³⁴ In the immediate aftermath, Ilchester’s landlady ‘was in such terrible agonies occasioned by fear that I thought She would have died of the fright, as one of her neighbours has since’. By morning ‘all the squares and streets were full of people confessing themselves in their shirts and smocks’. But Ilchester reserved his sternest criticism for the grand duke of Tuscany who had demonstrated the least control of all: ‘nobody nor no thing [reacted] more so than the great Duke who ran into his Garden and had Mass begun as soon as the first priest could be found’.³⁵ In singling out the grand duke, Ilchester directed a particularly pointed criticism towards the ruling elite of another nation. This criticism was not just symptomatic of a generalized stereotyping of southern Europe as emotionally uncontrolled. It should also be read within the context of the rather cool Anglo-Florentine relations of the 1720s.³⁶ In turn, as these diplomatic relationships improved, so did individual British Tourists’ accounts of the grand dukes.

Grand Tourists may often have passed negative comment on the fearfulness and inferior conduct of their servants. But this was not always the case. Indeed, occasionally Tourists’ narratives used the concept of a fearless servant as an opportunity to contrast elite men’s ‘informed’, intelligent courage with the lower orders’ more common ‘unthinking’ courage. Laurent the Bold, valet to Herbert on his Tour of 1775–80, is one example of a fearless servant. Herbert’s Tour was notable for the size of the travelling party, comprising two tutors, his Newfoundland dog Rover, and his manservant Laurent, to whom the Pembroke circle gave the soubriquet ‘the Bold’. Unlike the many fearful servants who populated the rest of Herbert’s Tour narrative, Laurent was the antithesis of this trope and was consistently represented as a figure of capability, physicality and courage – a man unfazed by even the most challenging conditions. At one point, Laurent fricasseed a chicken for his master’s dinner in a peasant’s hut, a feat that led Herbert to boast that ‘The Bold … is a most excellent Fellow on these Expeditions’.³⁷ He matched his master’s physicality as they outwalked mules in Italy, and his courage was known beyond their travelling party.³⁸ After reading William Coxe’s Sketches, Herbert’s old Harrow master asked if ‘the Servant, who was taken with a sudden panic, going along the Precipice, was Laurent. I can hardly think it was, as I know his courage’.³⁹

Coxe provided the most dramatic example of Laurent’s boldness in his description of their Mer de Glace expedition, which they undertook during 1776. Coxe identified the principal dangers as the glacier’s 500-foot-deep chasms and the slippery nature of the ice. In this context, ice was a particularly symbolic element as a successful navigation of the glacier required an even greater degree of bodily self-control. Sensibly equipped with crampons and spiked poles, Herbert, Coxe and the rest of the party were able to move with increased ‘courage and confidence’. This led Coxe to conclude that while ‘This account appears terrible; … we had not the least apprehension of danger’.⁴⁰ However, not all of the party took these precautions. As Coxe continued: ‘One of our servants had the courage to follow us without crampons, and with no nails to his shoes; which was certainly dangerous, on account of the slipperiness of the leather when wetted’.⁴¹ This unnamed servant, almost certainly Laurent, acted with extreme fearlessness and, in doing so, had placed himself in serious danger.

By these actions, Laurent’s courage might appear to have outstripped that of his superiors. Despite, or perhaps in response to, this possible threat, the Pembroke circle carefully fashioned Laurent’s image in their description of Herbert’s Grand Tour. The outcome corresponded with an established eighteenth-century literary figure, dubbed ‘the sexy footman’ by the historian Kristina Straub. Some male servants, such as footmen, were chosen for their splendid physiques and were imbued with a virile sexual charisma in theatre and literature. This sharpened the struggle for dominance between master and servant, a potential imbalance which Straub argued was addressed from mid century onwards, and in the context of sensibility’s growing appeal, through fictional depictions of idealized menservants characterized by their homosocial loyalty to their masters. In his popular novel, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker (1771), Tobias Smollett made clear that the servant Clinker’s ‘manly strength’ and physical sexuality was firmly contained by his subservient loyalty, allowing for a compelling cross-class bond that did not threaten the status quo.⁴² The ability to command the loyalty and physical vitality of these hyper-masculine servants became an even greater advertisement for their masters’ virtues and ability to command others. At the same time, attempts to depict such relationships and capacities were fraught with difficulties as the potential for the manly servant to outstrip his master in feats of courage often proved hard to control.

In a manner akin to Smollett’s Humphry Clinker, the Pembroke circle were able to control Laurent’s masculine image by celebrating their servant’s loyalty to Herbert. Here was a man characterized as ‘faithfull’, ‘trusty’ and ‘honest’, whose attachment to his master gained widespread attention. Writing to Herbert from Rome, the art dealer Thomas Jenkins commented on Laurent’s absolute determination to rejoin his master in Turin, despite the route being blocked by snow in March 1780.⁴³ Laurent had actually returned to Rome to get married, an act of independence that was generally frowned upon by employers, and which distinguished him from the fictional Clinker who decisively put his master before his love life.⁴⁴ By emphasizing Laurent’s loyalty, the Pembroke circle and Jenkins determinedly rewrote his motivations and ignored such inconvenient truths.

Their writings also paralleled canine loyalty with Laurent’s apparently single-minded devotion. Floyd and Lady Pembroke depicted Laurent as akin to a guard dog, while a tendency to ask about Laurent and Herbert’s dog Rover (also celebrated for never leaving Herbert’s side during the most dangerous parts of his travels) together indicates an association, conscious or unconscious, between servant and dog.⁴⁵ The more bestial aspects of this connection were also drawn out. Herbert, drawing upon a debasing connotation with dog breath, recorded how the hungover ‘ Bold’s Br-th over st—k to such a horrible degree lately that I very much doubt of his soundness’.⁴⁶ Laurent’s courage on the glacier ice should be read in this context. In ‘following’ Herbert, he became a faithful dog refusing to leave his master’s side. Laurent was a valet but the Pembrokes’ depiction of him can be seen as an early example of elite men’s readiness to fuse the characteristics of their outdoor servants and dogs. By the early nineteenth century, these men and animals were frequently celebrated for their shared attributes of ‘loyalty, vitality, strength, bravery, health or cunning’.⁴⁷ By animalizing Laurent’s motives and actions, his masters implied a bestial emotional capacity and intelligence that attributed his ‘courage’ to a lack of sensibility rather than genuine bravery. In contrast, Herbert and his tutors actively recognized and strategically overcame the dangers through using the correct equipment, such as crampons. Thus, Laurent the Bold formed an excellent foil in which his laudable, but ultimately simplistic, courage served to reveal his master’s more complex performances.

The Pembroke circle’s handling of servants in their Grand Tour narratives suggests a sophisticated awareness of and response to the shifting cultures, discourses and hierarchies of emotion and command. This was accompanied by a determination to establish Herbert with a masculine image suited to a career in the military and the fashionable cult of sensibility. Yet the example of Laurent shows that these strategies were fraught with difficulty. Embodying several masculine traits that his masters sought to attain, Laurent’s conduct reveals how men from different social strata could share markers of successful masculinity. To ensure that Laurent’s admirable male conduct complemented but did not outstrip their own, Herbert and members of the Pembroke circle established a carefully nuanced and maintained hierarchy of physicality, emotion and command. This creative example of elite self-fashioning and power was – as the next section demonstrates – just one of the ways in which Tourists could exploit narratives of danger to promote a sense of self.

Men of feeling and men of wit: alternative narrations of danger and masculinity

In 1754–6, George Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham, and George Bussy Villiers, later the 4th earl of Jersey – along with their tutor, the poet and playwright, William Whitehead – undertook a Grand Tour. During this time, they performed a range of masculinities including the polite and sociable cosmopolitan, art enthusiast, military tourist and gentleman of science. Yet their efforts did not always meet with approval. The architect Robert Adam, for example, claimed that Nuneham’s and Villiers’s enthusiasm for continental fashion and manners had gone so far ‘as almost to disguise the exterior of an Englishman’.⁴⁸ Though this was not intended as a compliment, both men – having determinedly pursued the extremes of fashion throughout their travels – would have claimed it as such. This hyperfashionable identity was one that they maintained into adulthood during the 1760s and 1770s, as part of the Macaroni set: a group of gentlemen who continued to adopt the extremes of continental dress and styles after their Grand Tours.⁴⁹ Writing in the 1790s, the literary hostess and author, Elizabeth Montagu, would declare the 4th earl of Jersey to be ‘the Prince of Maccaronies’.⁵⁰

During his Grand Tour, Nuneham’s letters to his sister and parents revealed a similar devotion to fashion and self-presentation, including detailed critiques of his and others’ wardrobes and his fashion purchases for his mother and sisters.⁵¹ In addition, Nuneham strove to establish himself as a man with a reputation for emotional sensitivity. From the mid century, the sentimental ‘man of feeling’ was increasingly viewed as a family figure who expressed his true refinement with intimate, trusted loved ones and friends, and through displays of weeping, sighing and trembling.⁵² Correspondingly, Nuneham cast himself as accomplished in the culture of feeling and encouraged his sister to write to him in a freer, more open style: ‘I have told you over & over again that what ever you say I like, & why will you not put down all your thoughts?’⁵³ He recommended the plays of the French dramatist, Pierre Carlet de Chamblain de Marivaux (1688–1763), and confidently predicted ‘you will weep … I never read [La Mère Confidente] … without feeling the most pleasing melancholy in the world’.⁵⁴ He affected to dread numerous horrors as diverse as war, his sister’s reactions to the clothes he brought for her and even the reading of a long book: ‘my courage was never great enough to attempt such a work’.⁵⁵

Nuneham used his experiences of hardship and danger during continental travel to craft his masculine reputation for fashion and feeling. For example, while he appreciated the beauty of mountainous landscapes, he also emphasized the extreme physical discomfort and fear they instilled in him. Writing in July 1755, he recounted how, when travelling from Bonn to Coblentz, ‘we went over the most terrible precipices where we were often obliged to get out for fear of being thrown down them into the Rhine’.⁵⁶ A mild twelve-mile pleasure trip in an open traineau (sledge) through the snow to Mersenburg in December 1754 dramatically became ‘our Greenland kind of adventure’.⁵⁷ Rather than laying claim to hardiness, Nuneham used these experiences to emphasize his physical delicacy. During the Mersenberg journey, the cold was so intense that he ‘was numbed for a quarter of an Hour so much as not to be able to stand’.⁵⁸ He grimly observed that: ‘I think we were lucky in going when we did, for had we gone to Day or yesterday we might have been in great danger of being froze to Death for it is now much colder’.⁵⁹ Warnings and complaints aside, Nuneham’s narrative was focused principally on his marvellous outfit, which included a pelisse that was so fine and tight that he could not fit his coat over it. This was a dilemma that perhaps explains his extreme cold. Nuneham sacrificed his warmth, comfort and (implicitly) his safety in order to cut a fashionable figure. Despite suffering, he was unrepentant about his fashion decisions, thus using a situation of danger and discomfort to demonstrate his dedication to taste.

On their earlier Tour of 1739–41, Horace Walpole and his friend, the poet Thomas Gray, had proved similarly creative in constructing a distinctive identity through their narration of danger. Throughout his adult life, Walpole invested in a rather unusual elite identity based on disavowing traditional aristocratic ambitions. Though an MP between 1741 and 1768, Walpole resisted active involvement with parliament, government or the military, and in doing so refused to assume an elite command of authority. Yet Walpole also evidently wished to retain a position of privileged exclusivity. This required him to seek other means of distinction via his literary and aesthetic abilities and a dedication to novelty.⁶⁰ Walpole began constructing this rather idiosyncratic identity in earnest during his Grand Tour – as witnessed by his decision to cast himself as uncourageous, uncommanding and non-physical in his accounts of danger.

Throughout his Grand Tour letters, Walpole deliberately disassociated himself from any physical displays of endurance, courage, stoicism and fortitude. On his return journey through Italy, for example, he complained vociferously of the discomforts of travel: ‘Do but figure to yourself the journey we are to pass through first! But you can’t conceive Alps, Apennines, Italian inns and postchaises. I tremble at the thoughts. They were just sufferable while new and unknown, and as we met them by the way in coming to Florence, Rome, and Naples; but they are passed, and the mountains remain!’⁶¹

His comically witty accounts of danger, particularly the 1739 Mount Cenis crossing, were relayed from Turin in detail to Richard West, a friend of both Gray and Walpole from their Eton days. These further subverted the accepted ideas of a hardy masculine response to danger. The crossing was enlivened by two incidents, the first of which saw the Tourists’ porters drink to excess. Walpole reported how, as ‘[T]he Devil of Discord in the similitude of sour wine’ took hold, the men had started to fight and had nearly plunged Gray and himself off ‘the very highest precipice of Mount Cenis’.⁶² In this account, Walpole used the familiar trope of the uncontrolled lower orders. The porters were bestial, demonic ‘Alpine savages’ with ‘cloven foot’, uncontrollable in their ‘rushed’ movements and drunkenness. But whereas other Tourists might have demonstrated their ability to regain command over such men, Walpole depicted himself as remaining passively in danger, unable to exert authority over the situation. The second incident during the same crossing was the death of Walpole’s dog:

Once again, Walpole’s reaction was one of passivity – this time from his chaise where ‘I saw it and screamed, but in vain’ – and it was the postilion who leapt into action. Walpole portrayed himself as a helpless, almost feminine, victim who was unable to save either himself from a precipice or his dog from a wolf. His documentation of the scream is particularly startling. In this external, involuntary vocal manifestation of an internal lack of control, he effectively undermined any personal claims towards stoicism.

Rather than becoming a pathetic figure, Walpole created a self-reflective masculinity that drew authority from self-mockery. Comically mourning the ‘dearest creature’, Walpole was alert to the fantastic nature of the incident and the political irony of a King Charles spaniel named Tory being killed by wolves. His two correspondents, Richard West and his cousin Henry Seymour Conway, responded in a similar spirit, and used the incident to showcase their command of classical, literary and historical references. In his reply, West vowed never to praise Mount Cenis ‘unless she serves all her wolves as Edgar the Peaceable did’, and compared Tory’s death to ‘poor Mrs Rider … tore to pieces by the savages’.⁶⁴ Conway’s response highlighted his appreciation of the ridiculous and comic, noting with a theatrical mixture of irony and pathos, ‘You painted it with such eloquence that it would have drawn tears from a stone … the size of the wolf etc. seem to be circumstances maliciously chosen to make me not p—ss this ten days … and that little bark pierced my heart with grief!’⁶⁵ Conway drew upon the popular eighteenth-century trope of pet elegies – a demonstration of verbal dexterity characterized by a certain jeu d’esprit–to state that, while his response ‘shan’t be a letter of condolence, nor will I seal it with black wax’, it did ‘carry its sadness … in its countenance and in the very heart and bowels’.⁶⁶ Conway went on to ask that Walpole ‘design him an apotheosis a la payenne or a canonization a la bonne catholique. His [Tory’s] exit was so extraordinary that I can’t be content unless you make it miraculous’.⁶⁷ Conway closed by placing the dog in a classically inspired afterlife, where ‘the dear little jetty rogue enjoys the post of cup-bearer [to the hunting goddess, Diana] and is at this moment giving a boire to her Chastity’.⁶⁸

In the decades following their return to England, Walpole and Gray established considerable literary reputations which drew on the incidents and literary skills first explored in their Grand Tour letters. For example, in 1747 Gray published an elegy on Walpole’s cat, Selina, who drowned in a tub of goldfish. Like the correspondence over Tory’s death, the elegy was a witty, amusing piece.⁶⁹ During the Grand Tour, Gray had also used Tory’s death to experiment with a variety of literary forms, including a farcical parody of his travels. In this, he replaced Tory with himself: ‘[Gray] is devoured by a Wolf, & how it is to be devoured by a Wolf ’.⁷⁰ In reimagining Tory’s death as his, he nodded towards a cultural tendency to cast dogs as extensions of the self and began to effectively draw out the process of exploring death, pain and danger and their associated emotions.

Elsewhere, Gray had experimented with an approach also found in sublime discourses. One letter reflected ‘If [Tory] had not been there, and the creature had thought fit to lay hold of one of the horses; chaise, and we, and all must inevitably have tumbled above fifty fathoms perpendicular down the precipice’.⁷¹ In these alternative outcomes, Gray traced the fall that culminated in his imaginary death. Likewise, in sublime discourses individuals frequently traced the fall off the precipice with a fixed gaze that divorced consciousness from the analytical self. This visual and imaginary progress culminated with the victim striking the ground, resulting in an imagined obliteration of the self.⁷² Gray’s reflections potentially dwelt upon a similar emotional experience. While briefly done, Gray’s writings on Tory’s death indicate a creative, experimental approach towards meditating upon the worst outcome of encountering danger.

In their reflections on death, danger and fear, Nuneham, Walpole and Gray were less concerned with charting their emotional reactions than to experiment with the skill, wit and humour that later became an important part of their masculine identities and ambitions. Tory’s grisly demise, for example, was consciously used to that end. And Walpole’s pet was not alone in being used to convey his owners’ personal perspectives on their masculinity. As the final section of this chapter explores, dogs on the Grand Tour were often used as opportunities to mediate on danger and the self – though in ways less concerned with deliberate self-presentation and more with managing unwanted reactions to danger.

Dogs, emotions and extensions of the self

Eighteenth-century elites enjoyed close association with their dogs. While dogs were non-human ‘others’, occupying servile or captive positions, they were also companions and objects of affection.⁷³ As noted, from the mid century male members of the elite sought to promote their reputation for emotional sensibility, and their capacity to be moved by others, as an indicator of superior status. Studies of writings on pets make it clear that eighteenth-century owners’ deep sentimental relationships with their animals played an important role in creating opportunities to reflect and emote. Animal deaths led to considerations of human mortality, while political and social satires made frequent reference to pets as extensions or projections of their owners.⁷⁴

Dogs were also a common presence on the Grand Tour and feature regularly in visual sources such as the portraits of Pompeo Batoni. Tourists and their correspondents delighted in drawing out the similarities between themselves and their pets. How then did such projections serve Grand Tourists, especially when pet and owner found themselves in danger? First, they provided another opportunity to affirm a variety of masculine identities ranging from the rejection of demonstrable courage, to the embrace of high emotion or a striving for hardiness. The final moments of Walpole’s Tory, for example, were clear indication that the dog – and therefore his master – was totally unsuited to harsh physical terrains. Animals played a similar purpose for George, Viscount Nuneham, who received a barbet dog as a present from a Saxon nobleman. He named the pet Mufty and sent it home to his mother – a gesture which symbolized his deep attachment to his parents and family. The dog died of a leg injury soon after its arrival home and, in death, Mufty presented Nuneham with another opportunity to depict himself as a person of extreme sensibility. Upon receiving the news, Nuneham wept, ‘had he [Mufty] had ever such occasion for it I could never have brought myself to have dressed his leg, for I am such an idiot that I can not touch any creature in pain or that has a wound, & I am confident was my greatest friend, to fall suddenly ill & want bleeding, my weakness would be such as to prevent my being of the least assistance to him’.⁷⁵

In contrast, the dogs of Grand Tourists who revelled in hardier, more martial masculinities were much different. Herbert’s dog, Rover, was a large, robust Newfoundland who successfully accompanied him on his Scandinavian and Alpine explorations, while John Holroyd’s hunting dog – Lady Mary – was so eager to pursue game that she tumbled off a precipice. Both animals were singularly suited to masters who took pride in their hardy enjoyment of outdoor pursuits.

Holroyd and Herbert were both committed to constructing a narrative of tough masculinity, in which they repeatedly sought to mute their emotional reactions to danger. Curiously, however, this practice was disrupted when it came to recounting Rover and Lady Mary’s experiences of harm. Such accounts therefore allow us to consider how these young men may have accommodated – or failed to accommodate – emotions of fright, horror and distress, that had been involuntarily experienced in situations of danger, but that they could not openly express in their writings.

Lady Mary fell while her master was crossing the Alps in July 1764. This unsettled Holroyd to the extent that he recounted the episode as a postscript and an additional entry in his letter and journal:⁷⁶ ‘Amidst the Alps Lady Mary in The Pursuit of Game tumbled headlong from a Great precipice of rocks, I was walking & seeing the fall, thought it impossible but she must be dashed in pieces, However she was not the least hurt, she immediately ran towards me shaking her tail in a supplicant manner as if she done wrong’.⁷⁷ Throughout his Tour correspondence, Holroyd wrote often of his attachment to Lady Mary. During Rome’s carnival they even exchanged places, as she rode in the carriage as a licentious nobleman while he masqueraded on top of it as her squire.⁷⁸ This attachment was extended during her accident. As with Gray’s description of the imagined carriage accident, Holroyd traced his dog’s uncontrolled descent, emphasized her headlong tumble and ended by imagining her ‘dashed in pieces’. Holroyd then further reinforced their connection by recording how the dog’s immediate instinct was to run straight to him. This affectionate relationship between dog and master perhaps allowed Lady Mary to fulfil a completely different role to the fearful servant by becoming a permissible – or perhaps secretive – site of anxiety and fearful imaginings for her owner. By revisiting the fall several times over a two-month period, Holroyd may, like Gray, have read himself into the dog’s fall, imagined his own death, and thus carefully explored fears that could not be easily expressed elsewhere in his chosen masculine discourse.

Imbued with an emotional climate of affection, a Tourist’s relationship with his dog provided an outlet for greater emotional expressiveness among hardy, more stoical masculine cultures. But even here, there were limits. When Rover, Herbert’s Newfoundland dog, died in unspecified circumstances in 1779, the news generated an outpouring of sympathy. Thomas Eyre, for example, wrote, ‘Alas! poor old Rover! I am very sorry the poor old Fellow did not live to see his native Country again’.⁷⁹ Herbert’s father, Henry Herbert, 10th earl of Pembroke, gave his son direct permission to grieve over an animal with a gesture that also reinforced the elite’s belief in their superior emotional sensibilities: ‘I sincerely regret him, & condole with you, knowing it is a much more serious loss, than vulgar minds can conceive’.⁸⁰ In doing so, Pembroke elevated Rover to a near-human level of dignity and planned out an imaginary funeral procession in which Coxe and Floyd acted as pallbearers. However, although Pembroke encouraged a particular display of sentimentality, he was not inviting his son to indulge in wider expressions of emotional vulnerability. Consequently, when Pembroke’s insensitive offer of a new puppy provoked an emotional outburst from Herbert – who advised him that he ‘may send it to H-ll’ – his mother and father swiftly rebuked him for this display of anger and upset.⁸¹ In tune with orchestrating a narrative of danger that celebrated Herbert’s hardy, stoic and self-controlled masculinity, the young man’s parents exhibited a rigid disapproval at any splenetic behaviour in their son. This episode was no exception.⁸²

Herbert may have snapped at his father; however, this outburst needs to be set in the context of his parents’ difficult marital relationship, his father’s highly erratic decision-making, and the increasingly tense relationship between his two tutors. All these factors had a direct and significant impact on Herbert’s Grand Tour and his emotional state. His outburst may be considered as an ‘emotional refuge’, which the historian William Reddy defined as a moment or space in which individuals are able to reduce the conflict and tension experienced by conforming to a dominant emotional regime.⁸³ Holroyd’s reaction and repeated return to his dog in danger might also be seen in a similar way. These moments offer brief glimpses into the interior struggle to maintain emotional and written performances that lived up to the desired ideal.

As the historian Michael Roper has shown in his psychoanalytical analysis of writings by First World War combatants, unwanted and involuntary responses to traumatic events are almost always present in narratives.⁸⁴ Unlike Nuneham’s, Walpole’s and Gray’s reflections on dogs in danger, it is unclear whether Herbert and Holroyd consciously used these moments as chances to express emotions or whether these were involuntary expressions. A similar uncertainty surrounds the tendency of Grand Tourists to express negative emotions within the concluding lines of their writings. Take, for example, a poem by John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, written in 1729 after experiencing a violent storm off the coast of Italy. Having vomited due to seasickness, Hervey recorded how:

Hervey’s poem is emotionally charged with cheerful hilarity. While his servant, old John, pleaded with him to turn the boat to shore, he laughed at the danger and his predicament. Yet the emotional and physical fallout of this experience appeared fleetingly in the immediate aftermath. Upon reaching land:

A similar pattern appears in George Legge, Viscount Lewisham’s 1777 account of climbing the highest mountain in the Canton of Appenzell, as discussed in chapter 4. Lewisham’s account was characterized by cheerfulness and emotional restraint, yet his concluding words described how the party’s return to safety resulted in ‘some hours of profound sleep’ which ‘buried all our cares, dangers & fatigues into oblivion’.⁸⁷ Brief commentaries like these can potentially be read as moments in which the carefully constructed narratives of danger faltered or as spaces in which uncomfortable emotional responses could be safely stated and confined. These moments of disjuncture are not only evidence of the tension between the ideals and lived reality of the Grand Tour; they also hint at the ways in which experiences and performances of masculinity were internalized by elite young men engaged in continental travel.

Accessing the raw, unmediated emotions experienced by eighteenth-century Grand Tourists ultimately remains beyond the reach of historians. This said, it is important to note the efforts travellers made to construct retrospective travel narratives which, in offering socially acceptable emotional and physical responses to hazard, served to construct and assert a young man’s masculine identity. This act of representation was itself an extension of the experience as the mind and body consciously or subconsciously processed the event; but it was also a careful reconstituting of experience that was central to making the Tour a success through its careful presentation to others. Circulated among family, friends and influential circles, these narratives were closely scrutinized in order to see how the next generation of elite leaders had fared during an important rite of passage in an often perilous continental setting. Whether they aligned themselves with a hardy masculinity, or with that of the fashionable man of feeling, or the literary wit, individual Tourists were required to place themselves within a wider elite discourse centred on power, command, emotional hierarchies, emotional self-control and authority. Even as these young men sought seemingly polarized masculine identities and virtues, the experiences and representations of danger proved a dominant and unifying theme for achieving this goal on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.

_______________________

* A version of this chapter was published as an article, ‘Dogs, servants and masculinities: writing about danger on the Grand Tour’, in Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, xv (2017), pp. 3–21. I am grateful for the permission of the Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies’ editor for permission to reproduce this material.

1 See e.g., G. Schneider, The Culture of Epistolarity: Vernacular Letters and Letter Writing in Early Modern England (Newark, N.J., 2005), p. 22; M. Fulbrook and U. Rublack, ‘In relation: the “social self ” and ego-documents’, German History, xxviii (2010), 263–72; S. M. Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: a Pragmatic Approach (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Pa., 2002); Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers, 1600–1945, ed. R. Earle (Aldershot, 1999).

2 J. Bourke, Fear: a Cultural History (London, 2006), pp. 6–7, 74, 287–8. For a wider overview of the history of emotions, see U. Frevert et al., Emotional Lexicons: Continuity and Change in the Vocabulary of Feeling, 1700–2000 (Oxford, 2014); J. Plamper, The History of Emotions: an Introduction, trans. K. Tribe (Oxford, 2015).

3 C. Brant, Eighteenth-Century Letters and British Culture (Basingstoke, 2006), p. 229.

4 W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2004), p. 125.

5 See S. Goldsmith, ‘Nostalgia, homesickness and emotional formation on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour’, Cultural and Social History, xv (2018), 333–60, for a fuller critique of Reddy’s and other history of emotion theories.

6 Y. N. Harari, The Ultimate Experience: Battlefield Revelations and the Making of Modern War Culture, 1450–2000 (Basingstoke, 2008), pp. 136–8.

7 Harari, Ultimate Experience, p. 104.

8 Harari, Ultimate Experience, pp. 141, 203.

9 See S. Knott, ‘Sensibility and the American War for Independence’, American Historical Review, cix (2004), 19–40, at pp. 27–30; C. Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 70, 79–81.

10 J. Shipp, Memoirs of the Extraordinary Military Career of John Shipp (London, 1890 [1829]), pp. 106–7, quoted in Harari, Ultimate Experience, p. 203.

11 ‘adrenaline, n.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/2756?redirectedFrom=adrenaline> [accessed 23 June 2015].

12 ‘exhilarate, v.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/66192?redirectedFrom=exhilarate> [accessed 23 June 2015].

13 ‘thrill, n.3’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/201258?rskey=L5oB1t&result=3&isAdvanced=false> [accessed 23 June 2015]; ‘excitement, n.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/65799?redirectedFrom=excitement> [accessed 23 June 2015].

14 S. Bainbridge, ‘Writing from the perilous ridge: Romanticism and the invention of rock climbing’, Romanticism, xix (2013), 246–60; Bainbridge, ‘Romantic writers and mountaineering’, Romanticism, xviii (2012), 1–15, at p. 11.

15 W. Coxe, Travels in Switzerland: in a Series of Letters to William Melmoth (3 vols., London, 1789), i. 146–7.

16 Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, pp. 146–7.

17 S. M. Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: a Pragmatic Approach (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Pa., 2002), pp. 8–11.

18 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Constance, to Dartmouth, 8 Aug. 1777.

19 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 132, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, Lausanne, to Revd Dr Baker, 10 Nov. 1763.

20 W. Coxe, Sketches of the Natural, Civil and Political State of Swisserland (London, 1779), p. 153.

21 W. Coxe, Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden and Denmark (3 vols., Dublin, 1784), iii. 91, 92.

22 Coxe, Travels into Poland, iii. 91. My italics.

23 E.g., K. Straub, Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence between Servants and Masters in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Baltimore, Md., 2009), pp. 20, 114–17, 138; C. Steedman, Labours Lost: Domestic Service and the Making of Modern England (Cambridge, 2009), pp. 20, 114–7, 138, 219, 221.

24 Harari, Ultimate Experience, p. 161. For how this emerged in more paternalistic attitudes, see J. E. Cookson, ‘Regimental worlds: interpreting the experience of British soldiers during the Napoleonic War’, in Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic War, 1790–1820, ed. A. Forrest, K. Hagemann and J. Rendall (Basingstoke, 2009), p. 26.

25 See Harari, Ultimate Experience, pp. 161–4, 185–6; R. Muir, Tactics and the Experience of Battle in the Age of Napoleon (New Haven, Conn., and London, 2000), pp. 48, 183–5.

26 N. Eustace, Passion is the Gale: Emotion, Power, and the Coming of the American Revolution (Chapel Hill, 2008), p. 79.

27 Eustace, Passion is the Gale, pp. 69, 78–9, 87, 158.

28 Eustace, Passion is the Gale, pp. 5, 78–9, 87, 261, 188–9, 190, 387.

29 Steedman, Labours Lost, pp. 219, 221–2.

30 H. Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (London, 1789), pp. 256–7.

31 The Complete Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, ed. R. Halsband (2 vols., Oxford, 1965), i. 281–2.

32 Lady Mary Montagu: Selected Letters, ed. I. Grundy (London, 1997), pp. 170–1; E. Bohls, Women Travel Writers and the Language of Aesthetics, 1716–1818 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 25–7.

33 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Vienna, to Dartmouth, 8 Oct. 1776.

34 Brit Libr., Add. MS. 51417, Stephen Fox, 1st earl of Ilchester, Florence, to Henry Fox, later 1st Lord Holland, 2 July 1729.

35 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 51417, Stephen Fox, Florence, to Henry Fox, 24 June 1729.

36 R. Sweet, Cities of the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 69–70.

37 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke’s Grand Tour journal, 1 Dec. 1779.

38 ‘Lord Herbert’s Grand Tour journal’, in Henry, Elizabeth and George (1734–80): Letters and Diaries of Henry, Tenth Earl of Pembroke and his Circle, ed. Lord Herbert (London, 1939), p. 259.

39 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/33, Thomas Bromley, Harrow, to Herbert, 14 Feb. 1779.

40 Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, i. 421–2.

41 Coxe, Travels in Switzerland, i. 422.

42 Straub, Domestic Affairs, pp. 15, 45, 139–40, 155–7.

43 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/33, Thomas Jenkins, Rome, to Herbert, 6 March 1780 and 4 March 1780.

44 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, Herbert’s journal, 23 Feb. 1780.

45 See, e.g., WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/33, Bromley, Harrow, to Herbert, 14 Feb. 1779; MS. 2057/F4/33, Dr Thomas Eyre, Fovant, to Herbert, 15 Dec. 1779.

46 Herbert’s journal, in Herbert, Henry, Elizabeth and George, p. 256.

47 M. Craske, ‘In the realm of nature and beasts’, in G. Waterfield, A. French and M. Craske, Below Stairs: 400 Years of Servants’ Portraits (London, 2003), pp. 160–2.

48 J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven, Conn., and London, 1997), p. 719.

49 See, e.g., S. O’Driscoll, ‘What kind of man do the clothes make? Print culture and the meanings of macaroni effeminacy’, in Studies in Ephemera: Text and Image in Eighteenth-Century Print, ed. K. D. Murphy and S. O’Driscoll (Lewisburg, Pa., 2013), pp. 241–79; P. McNeil, ‘Macaroni masculinities’, Fashion Theory, iv (2000), 373–404.

50 H. E. Maxwell, ‘Villiers, George Bussy, fourth earl of Jersey (1735–1805)’, ODNB <https://doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/28295> [accessed 14 Aug. 2014].

51 See, e.g., CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-7, George, Viscount Nuneham, later 2nd Earl Harcourt, [Germany], to his sister, Lady Elizabeth Harcourt [undated].

52 P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001), pp. 89–90, 93–6, 100.

53 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-3, Nuneham, Reims, to his sister, 25 July 1754.

54 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-16, Nuneham, Vienna, to his sister, 14 Sept. 1755.

55 E.g., CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-24, Nuneham [The Dutch Republic?], to his sister [undated].

56 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-14, Nuneham, Mentz, to his sister, 29 July 1755.

57 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-8, Nuneham, [Germany], to his sister, 18 Dec. 1754.

58 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-8, Nuneham, [Germany], to his sister, 18 Dec. 1754.

59 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-8, Nuneham, [Germany], to his sister, 18 Dec. 1754.

60 See J. Watt, Contesting the Gothic: Fiction, Genre and Cultural Conflict, 1764–1832 (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 21–39.

61 Horace Walpole, Florence, to Richard West, 4 Dec. 1740, in Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (48 vols., New Haven, Conn., 1937–), xiii. pp. 238–9.

62 Walpole, Turin, to West, 11 Nov. 1739, in Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xiii. pp. 188– 90.

63 Walpole, Turin, to West, 11 Nov. 1739, in Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xiii. 188–90.

64 West, Temple, to Walpole, 13 Dec. 1779, in Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xiii. 13, 196, n. 2–3. Edgar the Peaceable imposed an annual tribute of three hundred wolves’ heads in c. 968 upon the Welsh king. ‘Mrs Rider’ was a reference to Mrs Riding, a character in Antoine-François Prévost d’Exilles’ Le Philosophe anglais (1731–39).

65 Conway, Geneva, to Walpole, 18 Nov. 1739, in Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xxxvii. 43–4.

66 Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xxxvii. 43–4. See I. Tague, ‘Dead pets: satire and sentiment in British elegies and epitaphs for animals’, Eighteenth Century Studies, xliv (2008), 289–306, at pp. 289, 292–3.

67 Conway, Geneva, to Walpole, 18 Nov. 1739, in Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xxxvii. 43–4.

68 Conway, Geneva, to Walpole, 18 Nov. 1739, in Lewis, Walpole’s Correspondence, xxxvii. 43–4.

69 Tague, ‘Dead pets’, pp. 289, 300.

70 Gray, Florence, to Thomas Wharton, 12 March 1740, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. P. Jackson Toynbee, L. Whibley and H. W. Starr (Oxford, 1971), p. 140.

71 Gray, Turin, to Mrs Gray, 7 Nov. 1739, in Jackson Toynbee, Whibley and Starr, Correspondence of Thomas Gray, p. 126.

72 B. M. Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 352, 408, 413–21, 423.

73 I. Tague, ‘Companions, servants, or slaves? Considering animals in eighteenth-century Britain’, Studies in Eighteenth Century Culture, xlix (2010), 111–30.

74 E.g., K. Gardner, ‘Canis satiricus: Alexander Pope and his dogs’, ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews, xxvi (2013), 228–34; L. Brown, ‘The lady, the lapdog and literary alterity’, The Eighteenth Century, lii (2011), 31–45, at pp. 33–5; Tague, ‘Dead pets’, p. 298; M. Blackwell, ‘The it-narrative in eighteenth-century England: animals and objects in circulation’, Literature Compass, i (2004), 1–5, at p. 3.

75 CBS, MS. D-LE-E2-24, Nuneham [The Dutch Republic?], to his sister [undated].

76 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 154, Holroyd, Genoa, to Mrs Baker, 13 Aug. 1764; Add. MS. 61979 A, Holroyd’s Grand Tour journal, 19–21 July 1764.

77 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 154, Holroyd, Genoa, to Mrs Baker, 13 Aug. 1764.

78 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 168, Holroyd, Rome, to Revd Dr Baker, 8 March 1765.

79 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/33, Eyre, Fovant, to Herbert, 15 Dec. 1779.

80 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/29, Henry Herbert, 10th earl of Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 20 Apr. 1779.

81 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/31, Lady Elizabeth Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 7 Aug. 1779.

82 Goldsmith, ‘Nostalgia, homesickness and emotional formation’, pp. 346–8.

83 Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling, p. 128.

84 M. Roper, The Secret Battle: Emotional Survival in the Great War (Manchester, 2009).

85 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 51345, poem written in 1729 by John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, to his wife Mary. My emphasis.

86 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 51345, poem written in 1729 by John Hervey, 2nd Baron Hervey of Ickworth, to his wife Mary.

87 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, later 3rd earl of Dartmouth, Geneva, to William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.