Notes
Eighteenth-century Britain was a society in constant motion. As the country’s trading empire grew, vessels set sail to explore and trade around the globe. Within the British Isles, aristocratic households moved regularly between the town and country, labouring communities migrated for work, and domestic tourism was on the rise. Between the extremities of global and domestic travel lay the destination of continental Europe. Diplomatic, military, trade, intellectual and artistic networks facilitated travel across the channel at almost every level of society. These occupational travellers frequently took the opportunity to enact the role of tourist and were joined by a growing body of travellers from elite and middling backgrounds whose purpose for going abroad rested entirely on reasons of pleasure, curiosity and health. This nascent culture of tourism could result in short week- or month-long trips or in years spent in expatriate communities. It was stimulated by a developing genre of travel writing, which was also highly influential in the diffusion of key cultural trends, including the novel, sentimentalism, the sublime and picturesque, and Romanticism.
In the midst of this was the Grand Tour, a well-established educational practice undertaken by the sons of many eighteenth-century aristocratic and gentry families. The Tour, which dates back to the Elizabethan era, had its roots in a long tradition of travel as a means of male formation, which included the medieval practice of raising young boys in noble households and the Renaissance custom of peregrination. Its participants were young elite men in their late teens and early twenties, often travelling after school, home tutoring or university but before the responsibilities of adult life. As this was the most expensive, time-consuming and socially exclusive of the early modern options of educational travel, a Grand Tourist was typically the family heir, often with companions. These were mostly tutors (part companion, part in loco parentis) and servants, but could also include younger brothers, friends of a lesser rank and older male companions. These groups embarked on journeys that typically lasted between three to four years, although they could be as long as five years or as short as several months. During this time, Grand Tourists received a formal education, through tutors, academies and universities, and an experiential one, via encounters with a wide variety of European countries, societies and cultures. Key destinations included the cities, courts and environs of France, the Netherlands and Low Countries, the German principalities, Austria, Switzerland and Italy, with occasional excursions further afield.
As a practice of travel that catered exclusively to the young, elite and male, the Grand Tour had a distinctly educational purpose that distinguished it from other cultures of eighteenth-century travel. The Tour was understood as a finishing school of masculinity, a coming-of-age process, and an important rite of passage that was intended to form young men in their adult masculine identities by endowing them with the skills and virtues most highly prized by the elite.1 As a cornerstone of elite masculine education, it was a vital part of this social group’s understanding, practice and construction of masculinity, and of their wider strategies of self-fashioning and power.2 This intrinsic relationship between the Grand Tour and elite masculinity is at the heart of Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour.
Studies of the Grand Tour have typically focused on the destinations of Italy and France, and asserted that the Tour’s itinerary and goals prioritized polite accomplishments, classical republican virtue and an aesthetic appreciation of the antique. On the Grand Tour, elite young men were supposedly taught to wield power and social superiority primarily through cultural means. Through this, it is argued, male tourists were formed in a code of masculinity that was singularly polite and civil. This conclusion is influenced by the history of masculinity’s early theory – adapted from the sociologist R. W. Connell – which argued that historical understandings of maleness were dominated by a succession of hegemonic expressions of masculinity. As a cultural institution exclusively associated with the polite man, the Grand Tour has been viewed as a tool used to propagate and enforce a hegemonic norm. It is a principal contention of this book that these approaches have masked the full depth, breadth and complexity of the Grand Tour and, correspondingly, of eighteenth-century elite masculinity. As the book’s title suggests, it offers a reassessment of the Tour’s significance for the history of elite masculinity by investigating its aims, agendas and itineraries through bringing together archival evidence around the theme of danger.
The Grand Tour was an institution of elite masculine formation that took place in numerous environs across Europe, resulted in myriad experiences, and imparted a host of skills and knowledge. In his memoirs, published after his death in 1794, the historian and MP Edward Gibbon reflected on the ideal capacities of a Grand Tourist. Alongside ‘an active indefatigable vigour of mind and body’ and ‘careless smile’ for the hardships of travel, the Tourist, or traveller, required a ‘fearless’, ‘restless curiosity’ that would drive him to encounter floods, mountains and mines in pursuit of ‘the most doubtful promise of entertainment or instruction’. The Tourist must also gain ‘the practical knowledge of husbandry and manufactures … be a chemist, a botanist, and a master of mechanics’. He must develop a ‘musical ear’, dexterous pencil, and a ‘correct and exquisite eye’ that could discern the merits of landscapes, pictures and buildings. Finally, the young man should have a ‘flexible temper which can assimilate itself to every tone of society, from the court to the cottage’. In a line later edited out, he concluded that this was a ‘sketch of ideal perfection’.3
Gibbon’s list was wide-ranging, but even so he included only some of the Tour’s agenda. He made no mention of one of the most common expectations surrounding the Tour: that young men would gain an insight into the politics, military establishment, economy, industries and, increasingly, the manners and customs of other nations. The impressive diversity of the Tour’s agenda was intentionally ambitious and unified by a single aim: to demonstrate, preserve and reinforce elite male power on an individual, familial, national and international level. Acknowledging the full breadth of the Grand Tour’s ambition allows one to consider how this goal was achieved through a complex, calculated use of practice, performance, place and narrative. This book starts the process of unpacking the full extent of the Tour’s diversity by offering an in-depth examination of its provision of military education and engagement with war; the Tour as a health regime; Tourists’ participation in physical exercises, sports and the hardships of travel; and their physical, scientific and aesthetic engagement with the natural phenomena of the Alps and Vesuvius. Each episode in this agenda is united by two factors: it was understood to harbour elements of physical risk, and it has been largely neglected by existing scholarship. During these activities, encounters with danger were often idealized and used as important and formative opportunities that assisted young men in cultivating physical health, ‘hardy’ martial masculine virtues of courage, self-control, daring, curiosity and endurance, and an identity that was simultaneously British, elite and cosmopolitan.
In identifying the significance of ‘hardy’, martial masculinities to eighteenth-century elite culture, this book is not arguing that the masculinities of polite connoisseurship were any less important. Rather, it contends that the Grand Tour’s diversity of aims, locations and itineraries was intentionally used to form men in multiple codes of elite masculine identity. To have a ‘flexible temper’ that could be assimilated in ‘every company and situation’ was not simply a hallmark of polite sociability.4 It was evidence of a masculine trait of adaptability. Acknowledging that adaptability and multiplicity were crucial components to elite masculinity as a whole is central to moving the history of masculinity beyond the search for a hegemonic norm. Examining these issues through the theme of danger and hardy masculinity adds another degree of complexity to understanding the types of men that the eighteenth-century elite wished the next generation of British political, military and social leaders to be.
The itineraries, agendas and mentalities explored throughout this book are not easily visible in the contemporary published literature surrounding the Grand Tour and have, for the most part, been recovered through an analysis of archival sources. The Tour’s highly prized status has meant that related correspondence, journals, tutor reports and financial records were often carefully preserved. This book draws on research into more than thirty Grand Tours, taking place between 1700 and 1780, and closely follows the experiences and writings of these gentry and aristocratic Grand Tourists, their tutors, companions, servants and dogs. These men exchanged correspondence with a wider range of male and female family members, friends, diplomats and members of a continental elite befriended during their travels; they also wrote diaries and memoirs, commissioned and purchased portraits, artwork and mementos and, in the case of some tutors, published literature based on their travels. Recovering an individual and familial perspective allows one to delve beyond the cultural representation of the Tour into richly textured accounts of lived experience in all its complexity. Probing the differences between published and archival accounts enables a fuller, nuanced understanding of how the British elite as a community understood the Grand Tour, the masculinities that families hoped to cultivate in their sons and that these sons desired for themselves, and the ways in which this cultivation was undertaken. By investigating the priorities, agendas and beliefs evident in these sources, a collective elite agenda can be distilled while still allowing for individual approaches, divergences and disagreements.
Rethinking the Grand Tour
This book seeks to reconfigure the Grand Tour’s place in the historiography of the eighteenth century. In 1996, Michèle Cohen asserted the Tour’s significance as ‘a major educational and cultural experience shared by young men who constituted Britain’s ruling class’.5 Yet for the most part, the Tour has typically been studied from the perspective of the history of travel. This has certainly been a fruitful approach. In seeking to understand the value of particular destinations, travel historians have identified the Grand Tour’s vital role in shaping the British fixation on Italy and the rise of travel as a pleasurable, touristic practice. However, this has also resulted in a skewed view of the Tour’s primary purpose. The eighteenth-century British aristocracy and gentry primarily understood this element of continental travel as a means of maintaining their cultural, social and political power, through the process of educating and forming their sons. In accepting Cohen’s assertion as the starting point for thinking about the Grand Tour, the onus shifts from the significance of destinations to identifying why and how the Grand Tour was important to elite strategies of power.
Grand Tour historiography has already produced one excellent answer to this question, as encapsulated in Bruce Redford’s Venice and the Grand Tour (1996). Drawing on E. P. Thompson’s argument that the power of the eighteenth-century elite was ‘located primarily in cultural hegemony, and only secondarily in … economic or physical (military) power’, Redford contended that the cultural displays of taste achieved through undertaking the Tour were vital to maintaining elite political power.6 This line of analysis has given emphasis to four conjoined notions and destinations: Italy, and the significance of ancient republican Rome, together with France and the concept of politeness.
Admiration for Rome, Italy and classical culture pre-dated the eighteenth century. However, it gained enhanced relevance following the Glorious Revolution when Whig political and cultural ideologies appropriated classical models to manufacture an identity based on the history and iconography of ancient republican Rome. This led to an enduring association between the visual arts, classics and politics that had profound implications for the commissioning, purchasing and display of architecture and art. These activities fostered opportunities to display ‘one’s political and cultural allegiance to Roman republican values’.7 As Joseph Burke argued, ‘the self-identification of the Whig oligarchy with the senators of republican and imperial Rome’ gave a new purpose to the Grand Tour’s aesthetic and classical itinerary as a source of key inspiration.8 Through time spent in Italy, the Grand Tourist ‘encountered the material fragments of the classical heritage to which he was supposedly heir’, discovered the ‘rapture of identification with his noble predecessors’, and consequently was prepared for his future role in a ‘monumental patriarchal order’.9 Rome in particular transformed the Grand Tourist into a ‘gentleman-classicist, possessor of the past’, as he quite literally acquired and displayed proof of his cosmopolitan taste and civic-mindedness.10 This cultural hegemony was also performed by ‘reading’ the Italian landscape through corresponding classical texts, a skill that was regarded as proof of a classical education. Published travel literature in the first part of the eighteenth century, epitomized in Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Italy (1705), was dominated by this trope of ‘classical nostalgia’.11
Scholars’ initial emphasis on Italy as the Grand Tour’s ultimate destination derived from the attention then given to continental travel by art historians. But during the 1990s, another important connection was made from the perspective of the history of education. In her study of elite masculinity, Cohen yoked the Grand Tour to another key concept in Whig ideology: politeness. Tied to the shift in political power from the court to parliament, and to the rising commercialization and urbanization of society, politeness has, until recently, been understood as the dominant code of eighteenth-century masculinity.12 Within the context of aristocratic and gentry sociability, polite masculinity functioned as an ideal of social behaviour. It was a ‘dexterous management of words and actions’, that focused upon the mutual benefits of the ‘art of pleasing’.13 Characterized by a refined, virtuous nature that emphasized softened tempers and rationality, polite masculinity was also outwardly displayed through graceful movement. This was achieved through intensive bodily cultivation for which dance, swordplay and equestrianism were considered essential. In the seventeenth and early eighteenth century, French society was perceived to be the most civilized and polite of European societies. 14 In giving Grand Tourists access to Parisian society and to French academies, where they learnt to ride, fence, dance and speak French, the Grand Tour was an institution dedicated to forming its young participants in the arts of polite refinement.15
The young men who appear in this book fully embraced the Tour as an opportunity for personal refinement and art appreciation. Just before crossing the Alps in June 1764, John Holroyd, who came from an aspirational Anglo-Irish family and later became the 1st earl of Sheffield, wrote of his ‘Passion & Fury’ to see Italy.16 Others dedicated themselves to commissioning and collecting artwork intended for their family seats. Families like the earls of Pembroke and dukes of Richmond created outstanding examples of eighteenth-century architecture and art collections at Wilton House, Goodwood House and the (now disassembled) Richmond Gallery across several generations of building and Grand Tour collecting. Before even setting foot in Rome, Tourists spent time at academies in Paris, the Loire Valley and Turin, where they acquired the physical and linguistic graces of the polite gentleman. At the start of a Grand Tour that lasted from 1775 to 1778, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 3rd earl of Dartmouth spent three months at an academy in Tours (August–October 1775) and seven months at a Parisian academy (October 1775–March 1776). Lewisham was the eldest son of Frances Catherine and William Legge, the 2nd earl of Dartmouth, a couple who carefully blended strong religious and moral convictions with the maintenance of their elevated sociopolitical status. They clearly expected the same of their children, and social graces were central to this aim. In an affectionately jocular exchange that was typical of their close knit family, Lewisham joked that ‘you will certainly be much surprised if you find me in the Spring as unlicked a Cub as when I left England’.17 His father retorted in kind, stating that: ‘on the contrary, I fully expect to see you very upright in your figure, without thrusting out your rump behind, or your chin before, very easy & gracious in yr motions, very polite & engaging in your manners’.18
Important though they undoubtedly were, the pursuit of classical heritage, aesthetic taste and politeness accounted for just two elements of the Grand Tour. As scholars have relinquished a fixed gaze on Italy, the other ways in which travel was used to assert aristocratic privilege have begun to emerge.19 One of these was its importance in developing sociopolitical networks. In examining the origins of the Society of Dilettanti, Jason Kelly highlighted how the Grand Tour operated as ‘a laboratory’ for young elite men to experiment with their associational skills, and its instrumental role in forging social bonds between British and Irish tourists.20 Building on Stephen Conway’s observation that the British elites embraced their place within a pan-European high-elite culture, my own research has highlighted how socializing with Europe’s sociopolitical elite accounted for an enormous percentage of a Tourist’s itinerary.21 For example, on the 31 October 1777 Philip Yorke, who later inherited his uncle’s title and became the 3rd earl of Hardwicke, recorded in his diary that he had made 50 social calls during his first day in Vienna.22 This was but one instance of the intense social whirl that characterized his Grand Tour of 1777–9. Likewise, in the summer of 1755, the poet and playwright, William Whitehead was in Germany, acting as a tutor on a Grand Tour that lasted from 1754 to 1756. His two charges were George Bussy Villiers and George Simon Harcourt, Viscount Nuneham, the sons and heirs of the 3rd earl of Jersey and the 1st Earl Harcourt. Conscious that both families moved in courtly, political and fashionable society, Whitehead wrote to reassure the young men’s parents that they should not fear that too much time was being given to ‘things’ rather than ‘men’: ‘Our whole time is spent in Company’.23
The goal of these packed social itineraries was to reaffirm connections that had been established during previous family members’ Grand Tours, and to add new acquaintances to these networks. Grand Tour patterns of sociability were markedly shaped by the ever-changing political scene of alliances and power, although, as a rule, significantly more time was allocated to socializing in northern and central Europe. Elaine Chalus has described British elite social networks as a highly personal, influence-based form of politics that took place in social situations.24 The time and effort allocated to socializing on the Grand Tour points to the international dimension and ambitions of these sociopolitical networks, and indicates that the Tour was perceived by the British aristocracy as a useful tool in maintaining them.25 This was not unique to the British Grand Tour. Paola Bianchi, Mathis Leibetseder, Eva Chodêjovská and Zdenêk Hojda have respectively observed similar patterns in the sociopolitical activities of Savoyard, Hapsburg, German and Bohemian equivalents.26 This new line of research raises further questions, including the extent to which these international, intergenerational social networks exerted sway over international politics, diplomacy and trade.
While this branch of research locates the Tour within the wider practices of elite sociopolitical culture, others have considered it in the context of strategies used to advance a family’s social, economic and political status. Richard Ansell’s study of the educational travel practices of three generations of post-restoration Irish Protestant families, demonstrates that the full Grand Tour was only one in a number of educational travel options. Less prosperous families frequently pursued more financially viable forms of educational travel, including shorter continental tours. By contrast, wealthier families might send their eldest sons on the full Grand Tour while providing younger sons with other types of educational travel suitable to their ‘different estates’. Sir Philip, Robert and John Perceval, for example, all left Ireland for Oxford, Cambridge and Lincoln’s Inn in the 1670s but only the heir travelled to Europe. The second son undertook a domestic tour of Wales, while the youngest remained at home, following both his brothers on globes and maps.27
In the 1770s, William Legge, the 2nd earl of Dartmouth opted for a different strategy with his three eldest sons. His heir, that ‘unlick’d cub’, George, Viscount Lewisham, took the full Grand Tour from 1775–9 with his tutor, David Stevenson. William, the musically talented second son, accompanied him in 1775 for the French leg. Charles – the third son and destined for the army – joined from 1776–7 as they travelled through the militarized spaces of the Netherlands, Germany and Austria.28 After a six-month stay in Vienna, Lewisham escorted Charles back to England before setting out again for the south of France, Switzerland and Italy. Dartmouth’s decision may have been inspired by the success of his own Grand Tour, which he undertook in 1751–4 with his stepbrother and the future prime minister, Frederick, Lord North. Their Tour was a spectacular triumph during which they caught the attention of the influential Whig politician, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st duke of Newcastle. Lord North similarly made generous provisions for his sons around the same time as the travels of Lewisham and his brothers.
Scholars have recently sought to gain better insight into the mechanics of how educational travel worked. Richard Ansell and Paola Bianchi have examined the structures, finances and educational philosophies of academies and their connections to the wider political and cultural milieu through their respective case studies of Foubert’s Parisian and London-based academy and Turin’s Accademia Reale.29 John Gallagher’s study of early modern language learning has shone light on the formal and informal ways in which new skills were acquired. Scholars studied texts, received formal tuition and committed themselves to ‘essaying’ (writing regularly in another language), but early modern linguistic pedagogy also ‘demanded an engagement with the target language as it was spoken and heard’.30 This was achieved through seeking more immersive encounters with multilingual people in Britain and by travelling abroad. Eighteenth-century pedagogical practices continued to favour this combination of in/formal learning and immersion in language learning and in other areas of education. As chapter 2 outlines, it was used in the Tour’s military education, in which participants studied formally in academies, observed military activities during touristic activities and sometimes engaged in conflict as military volunteers. Likewise, the art of sociability was formally acquired in academies and informally through a young man’s integration in elite European society.31
Alongside instilling knowledge, the Grand Tour was also used to form men’s virtues, character, identities and even their emotional capacity. For example, it was deliberately designed to separate young men from their families and homes. This resulted in a set of anticipated emotional reactions and can therefore be termed an ‘emotional practice’. Monique Scheer defined emotional practices as events and actions that manipulated the ‘body and mind to evoke emotions where there are none … or to change or remove emotions already there’.32 Tourists were expected to express and respond to the emotions evoked by travel in the correct manner.33 One of these emotions was homesickness, to which the correct response was not straightforward. On the one hand, homesickness offered Tourists an opportunity to demonstrate their status as patriotic men of feeling with affectionate ties to their families and nation via expressions of longing. On the other hand, severe homesickness (nostalgia) was viewed as an irrational, provincial emotion that should not be experienced by enlightened cosmopolitan men of the world. Tourists were expected to learn how to overcome an excessive longing for home and, through this, demonstrate a capacity for virtues like self-control, resilience and restraint.34
Separating elite young men from home is one example of how the physical scenarios created by travelling and the resulting emotional responses were used to test, teach and form Grand Tourists. The scenario of danger and the varied physical and emotional reactions provoked by this experience is another. Danger as a formative test was central to the Grand Tour itineraries considered in this book. Chapter 2 explores the Tour’s educational military curriculum and places this within the context of wider scholarship on the elite’s traditional culture of military service. By highlighting continuities with earlier seventeenth-century practices – together with a historiography that identifies a late eighteenth-century resurgence of martiality – it explores the elite’s ongoing commitment to its identity as military leaders. Chapter 3 examines three interrelated sets of physical activity on the Grand Tour: exercise regimes, sporting activities and the physical experience and discomforts of travel itself. Physical exercises were used to attain elegant deportment and military discipline, but they were also part of a wider daily health regime. Sporting pursuits played an important role in social and homosocial activity as well as offering opportunities to display one’s physical courage and prowess. Courage also played a significant role in Grand Tour experiences of the hardships of travel, especially when journeying through mountainous routes. Here, Tourists sought to demonstrate their cheerful indifference to privation and their capacity for accurately judging danger. Chapter 4 considers what happened when Grand Tourists stepped out of their carriages, off the roads and onto the Alpine mountains and glaciers, and the slopes of Vesuvius. In detailing how ‘hardy’ masculinity was performed in these locations, the chapter argues that the Grand Tour’s culture of climbing and exploring the Alps and Vesuvius not only drew on Enlightenment discourses of exploration and the natural sciences, and on sublime theory, but was also a continuation of the courageous, physical performances found in war, exercise, sports and on the road.
Studying these itineraries enables a clearer insight into what elite families sought to achieve by sending their sons on the Grand Tour. One goal was to provide a thorough military education that prepared young men as effective military commanders, instilled in them the internal masculine virtues of courage, discipline, endurance and stoicism, and ensured they had a strong sense of their innately martial identities. This, as chapter 2 explores, was pursued in relation to military sites and scenarios in which Tourists were expected to confront the dangers of war with honour. This aim also strongly shaped engagement with a much wider range of physical dangers. As chapters 3 and 4 demonstrate, the frissons of difficulty and danger associated with sports, travel and natural phenomena meant that these environments and activities were seen as akin to the formative dangers of war, and were used for similar ends: the development and performance of hardy, courageous men capable of enduring danger with their self-control and honour intact. Irrespective of whether these men ever undertook active military service in their later careers, the capacity to encounter danger during the Tour was idealized as an important part of a successful masculine performance.
The Grand Tour was also intended to establish robust physical health. Chapters 3 and 4 investigate how this was achieved by capitalizing on prolonged exposure to salubrious topographies and climates, by establishing healthy daily routines, and through the healthful properties of travel itself. Grand Tourists anticipated that these practices would lead to bountiful good health for many years to come, and that this health would be of more immediate use in providing a valuable defence against the dangers of less salubrious parts of Europe, particularly when travelling through the heats and miasmas of Italy. Finally, elite families also hoped that the Grand Tour would produce young elite men who simultaneously had a firm sense of their British identity and of their place within a cosmopolitan, pan-European elite community. How to achieve this was a thorny issue and the cause of acute anxiety at a national and familial level. Linda Colley, among many others, has drawn attention to how young men protected their patriotic sense of Britishness through maintaining an ever-present disparaging xenophobic commentary on continental short-comings. Yet, at the same time, they also cultivated cosmopolitanism through an extensive, often appreciative interaction with continental elite culture.35 Chapter 4 explores other ways in which identity was produced and consolidated through exploring the calculated use of place, performance and encounters with danger.
Eighteenth-century ‘British’ traits – steadiness, vigour, industry, Protestantism and liberty – were associated with the nation’s superior sense of its political destiny and its ‘northern’ Europe geographical location. Spending time in other northern European locations with similarly wholesome, suitable climates and social, political and religious systems was therefore seen as an opportunity for British men to mature in a cosmopolitan but still familiar environment. As the Alps were designated particularly wholesome northern spaces, from mid century onwards Tourists devoted increased time to celebrating how physical exploration of the hazardous environments of glaciers and mountains assisted in preparing courageous, hardy and, above all, ‘British’ bodies, virtues and identities. These qualities were tested as Tourists crossed into Italy, where the ‘southern’ climate and culture tempted them to a life of indolence, enervation and immorality. Thus, while soaking in Italy’s artistic and classical heritage, Tourists were also expected to prove the fixed permanency of their identity by continuing to perform physical acts of hardy endurance. As one of the most physically arduous tasks undertaken by Grand Tourists, climbing Mount Vesuvius acquired particular symbolic significance as a defiant act of northern hardiness in the warm south.
Various means were used to achieve these three overarching aims of the Grand Tour. Actual physical practice and performance was important as young men were placed in testing scenarios and expected to respond accordingly. Where this performance occurred was as significant as what happened. Some scenarios were inextricably tied to certain geographies. Exposure to war, for example, required access to theatres of combat and was often prioritized in the Netherlands, Austria and Prussia, while natural phenomena like mountains, glaciers and volcanoes could only be easily encountered in the Alps and the kingdom of Naples. In contrast, securing good health and a strong identity could only be achieved by extensive travel between different destinations and climates. A successful Grand Tour therefore required a calculated use of Europe’s different terrains and climates. Finally, how Grand Tourists represented their actions and embodied physical, mental and emotional responses to these experiences in their written accounts and commissioned artwork was of fundamental importance. Chapter 5 examines the narrative conventions that shaped how Grand Tourists wrote about danger, the creative ways in which they used these encounters and narrations to lay claim to different elite masculine identities, and the careful means by which inappropriate responses to danger were sidelined, reconstructed and reallocated.
Rethinking the history of masculinity
Studying the Grand Tour also enables an intervention into the now rich and shifting histography of eighteenth-century masculinity. From its earliest stages, this field has been shaped by several key theoretical and methodological approaches. Efforts to identify the normative codes and the gendered logic that shaped the period’s most evident trends of masculinity has resulted in an overwhelming focus on analysing cultural representation.36 This focus is in part a legacy of preoccupations central to the ‘cultural turn’ but it has also been influenced by the sociologist R. W. Connell’s theory of hegemonic masculinity. Connell’s widely used model offers a historically sensitive way of analysing the power relations between varieties of masculinity and patriarchy. It contends that only one form of masculinity – a ‘hegemonic masculinity’ – can dominate at any given time. Other forms exist within three categories: ‘complicit’ (those which do not conform to the hegemonic model but do not challenge it); ‘subordinate’ (masculinities that are denied legitimacy); and ‘marginalized’ (masculinities which intersect with other axes of social stratification, like ethnicity or class).37
Pioneering historians of eighteenth-century masculinity, such as Philip Carter and Michèle Cohen, began by exploring how the so-called ‘paradigm’ of politeness was also the period’s hegemonic masculinity.38 It has since been argued that the pervasiveness of politeness has been overstated in histories of the eighteenth century.39 Within the study of masculinity, this revision has included querying the dominance of the polite gentleman, and the uncovering of an impressive array of alternative masculinities.40 These range from the sensitive man of feeling and the Enlightened man of letters to the civic-minded leaders of politics and the military, the chivalric man, sportsman, macaroni and libertine.41 Impolite and violent masculine behaviours abounded in the form of duelling, drinking, gambling, consumption of pornography and erotica, and a culture of raucously filthy humour and riotous sociability.42 Additional facets of eighteenth-century masculinity are continually being unearthed, as scholars have begun investigating the influence of social status, nationality, religion, health, occupation and familial position.43
Historians adhering to the framework of Connell’s theory have sought to explain these increasingly diverse and messy findings in two ways. First, through imposing a linear narrative in which one dominant expression of masculinity was eventually superseded by another.44 Early eighteenth-century politeness succumbed to persistent accusations that it collapsed into effeminacy and artifice, and was replaced in the mid eighteenth century by the man of feeling who in turn was attacked for similar failings and for his excess of uncontrolled emotion. He was replaced by a more robust, martial and civic-minded set of masculinities towards the end of the eighteenth century.45 A second explanation argues that the pervasive presence and celebration of impolite, violent and sexually explicit masculine behaviour should be read as a reflection of the difference between legitimate and subversively illegitimate masculinities.46
Yet there remains a palpable dissatisfaction with the effectiveness of these explanations and the underlying theoretical approach. As John Tosh and Ben Griffin observed, scholars have too readily denied the diversity and complexity of historical manhood in assuming that hegemonic masculinity is a cultural phenomenon tout court.47 Two further interrelated criticisms have also frequently been made. The first addresses the gap between the ideal and practice. Connell asserts that hegemonic masculinity rests on ‘a fairly convincing corporate display of masculinity’ rather than the ability of individuals to live up to the ideal.48 As the study of eighteenth-century masculinity had traditionally favoured sources centred on cultural representation, this has threatened to dissolve into a study of myths rather than of how actual men individually and collectively experienced and performed masculinity.49 As a result, the social remit of these cultural codes remains unclear.50 Yet the importance of performance should not be forgotten: gender theory insists that the construction of gender is achieved not just through rhetoric, reports and narration, but also through physical actions, behaviours and habits.51 These performances enabled social and homosocial groups to undertake a critical process of judgement, acceptance and rejection.52
These criticisms have resulted in a welcome rise in archivally based studies investigating the lived experience and performance of eighteenth-century masculinity.53 Yet through this, a second issue has become more pressingly apparent: not only were there multiple masculinities within one given time period, but individual men did not continually perform the same masculinity. In essence, historians have found that there was no steady adherence to one ‘hegemonic’ masculinity. As Carter noted in his study of the diarist, James Boswell, who himself undertook a Grand Tour in 1763–6, eighteenth-century manliness ‘was an essential but also complex and fluid identity, configured differently with respect to the sex, class and nationality of one’s companions, and the geographical location and time of day when meetings took place’.54 Alexandra Shepard’s extensive work on early modern archival records led her to argue that different forms of masculinity operated as ‘very loose categories rather than rigid types, with a considerable degree of fluidity’, and that ‘one man might conform to more than one category not only over the course of a lifetime but also over the course of a single day’.55 While it might now be recognized that multiple masculinities were in play, the dynamics of this process at a social and cultural level remain far from clear. For Griffin, this raised the issue of ‘situational identity’: how might a man’s immediate situation affect his masculine identity? This leads to numerous further questions: what degree of agency did men have in adopting and moving between different masculinities? Were these moves between different masculinities achieved consciously, intuitively, or subconsciously? How were these shifts experienced? How, or did, men internalize and make sense of their gender performances?56
The Grand Tour provides crucial insights into some of these complexities. Undertaken by the period’s most dominant social and political group, the Tour was a socially exclusive educational practice explicitly intended to impart the strategies, mechanism and opportunities that enabled men to identify themselves with a set of attributes that constituted ideal masculinity. During this period of learning, young men carefully constructed their claims to masculinity through their physical and social performances, and in their letters, diaries and artwork commissions. These claims were closely scrutinized and judged by wider elite communities in Britain and across Europe. Combined with the traveller’s desire to record new experiences, a son’s duty to report to his parents, and the often careful preservation of these records, the Grand Tour as a whole offers an unusually rich set of sources through which to re-evaluate eighteenth-century manhood.
From the perspective of Grand Tour studies, a revision is also needed. The Tour has been so exclusively associated with the formation of a distinctively polite masculinity that it has been argued the decline of politeness as the hegemonic masculinity led to the decline of the Grand Tour as an educational practice.57 Underlying this is an unspoken assumption that as a practice supposedly designed for the perfection of one type of masculinity, the Tour could not possibly be adapted to impart a new one. Evidence of non-polite masculine behaviours have either been ignored or – in the case of the Tour’s many instances of excess drinking, gambling and sex – identified as illicit, rebellious masculine expressions in tension with the hegemonic norm.58
This book broadens perceptions of the range of masculinities associated with the Tour through examining how it was used to construct elite identities that included military, sporting, chivalric and adventurer forms of manhood. These placed a common value on physically strong and courageous performances, on internal masculine virtues of courage, discipline, endurance and stoicism, and were crucially linked to an aristocratic understanding of themselves as a military service elite. Given such unifying traits, these performances may be thought of as instances of ‘hardy’ masculinity. The adjective ‘hardy’, meaning bold, courageous and daring, was a well-established term used principally in relation to a person’s manner, actions and qualities, and used approvingly by Grand Tourists themselves.59 For example, during his Grand Tour of 1775–80, George, Lord Herbert and later 11th earl of Pembroke, proudly described his tutor – the Anglican clergyman and writer, William Coxe – as ‘certainly nothing less than a hardy, stout, Man’.60 Calling themselves the ‘Triumvirate’, Herbert, Coxe and his second tutor, the army captain, John Floyd, revelled in their dramatic, arduous encounters with hardship and danger. In a Tour that meandered across the Netherlands, Germany, Austria, Poland, Russia, Scandinavia, Italy and France, the trio also spent nine months at a military academy in Strasbourg (November 1775–July 1776), three months at Turin’s Accademia Reale (December 1778–February 1779), and undertook protracted tours of Alpine mountains and glaciers, and of Warsaw, St Petersburg, Stockholm and Copenhagen via the fringes of the Arctic waste and the icy Gulf of Bothnia. This gave them a profound, shared sense of masculine superiority. During one mountain journey, Herbert scoffed, ‘I wish and still wish only that those Gentleman who find hardships in such trifles, had followed the Triumvirate through Swisserland [sic] and other places where they went for their pleasure’.61 As such, ‘hardy’ serves as a suitable portmanteau term for a specific set of masculine identities that encompassed military and other physical dangers.
In addition to establishing their hardiness at the military camp, or on a glacier or the slopes of Vesuvius, Grand Tourists devoted equivalent enthusiasm to cultivating other masculinities. They dedicated themselves to achieving the persona of the polite gentleman through their daily exercises and made enormous efforts to be received well by polite society. They framed themselves as cultivated men of taste by writing ecstatically about Rome’s ruins, and by collecting and commissioning art which they later displayed in their country seats. Their richly emotional exchanges with family and friends were intended as testament to their status as men of feeling, while they also demonstrated their capacity for rowdy associational masculinity by toasting, drinking, jesting and carousing with their peers. Crucially, none of these can be identified as the most dominant masculinity since young elite men were typically expected to display all of these attributes: together they formed part of the complex patchwork of what it was to be an elite man.
The Grand Tour therefore offers an exceptional insight into the working dynamics of ‘situational identity’. Grand Tourists were constantly moving between mountainsides, battlefields, courts and metropolises, polite and martial social cultures, republics and absolute monarchies, from mixed to homosocial groups, young to old, multiple nationalities to only British or French or Austrian. They spent time at balls, at university, on hunts, in art galleries and pleasure gardens, among classical ruins, in cabinets of curiosities, churches and taverns. Encountered within the context of elite social culture and through the practice of travel, these varied environments exposed Tourists to a range of standards and expectations on how to socialize and behave as an elite man. This exposure was deliberately sought after as elite men highly valued the ability to move seamlessly between a composite range of social and masculine behaviours.62 Men who could do this while appropriately retaining the instantly recognizable gentlemanly habitus, virtues and honour in any scenario were greatly admired by Grand Tourists for their judgement and versatility. When weighing up between Vienna’s new and old French ambassadors in 1778, Philip Yorke judged that, for all his suppers, balls and conversation, the incoming diplomat was incapable of ‘adapting himself to the manners of others’, and that the outgoing ambassador would have pleased his uncles more.63 Yorke commonly made assessments like these throughout his Grand Tour letters at the bequest of his uncles. The Yorkes were a powerful family within Whig politics and intellectual circles. Philip’s eldest uncle – also Philip Yorke, 2nd earl of Hardwicke – was an intellectual and influential political figure, while his younger uncle, Sir Joseph Yorke, followed an early military career with a thirty-year spell as the British minister to The Hague. The younger Philip subsequently began his Grand Tour by staying for a year with Sir Joseph at The Hague while attending Leiden University nearby. In asking their nephew to record and reflect on his social interactions throughout his time abroad, Philip’s uncles sought to sharpen his judgement of what made a good socialite, politician and elite man. Versatility emerged as a celebrated trait in Yorke’s commentaries.
In their 2012 study of landed gentry masculinity and education, Henry French and Mark Rothery found evidence of ‘fundamental and remarkably tenacious ideas of male honour, virtue, reputation and autonomy’ between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Self-control, independence, stoicism, courage, a command of others, morality, prudence, industry, cosmopolitanism and patriotism were a set of profound ordering principles that were deeply internalized within individuals and families, and diffused throughout social, political and economic institutions.64 Building on Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus theory, and the work of Fernand Braudel, French and Rothery speculated that while this value system was extremely slow to change, the social and cultural factors that codified how these principles should be expressed were far more likely to shift over time. As such, the various masculine trends and stereotypes identified in recent scholarship were simply different manifestations of the same virtues.65 Honour, for example, could be defended on the point of a sword, with a fist, or by words in the court of law. Self-control could be expressed through the bodily and verbal motions of polite deportment, through the physical disciplines of dancing, drill work, fencing or boxing, or through a courageous, disciplined response to scenarios of danger.
French and Rothery’s work is part of a wider effort to move beyond presuming a top-down relationship between cultural trends and individual men. In demonstrating how young men’s masculine identities were instead shaped by ‘everyday experiences’ and ‘familial cultures of masculinity’ shared across the gentry as a larger community, they have also shown that these cultures did not reliably correspond with broader cultural discourses and fashions. While they did sometimes intersect, they just as frequently ‘cut across or even disregarded’ them.66 Historians are increasingly recognizing the central role of ‘community’ and ‘family’ in establishing, communicating and enforcing ideals and behaviours. As Barbara Rosenwein, a historian of medieval emotion, and Simon Szreter, a historian of demography, have asserted, communities operated as vital networks and settings in which people acquired, reproduced and negotiated their social and gender identities, and where communal behaviours, like emotions, were learned and performed.67 Communities can be geographically defined or more disparate in nature, formed via kinship, similar social and cultural goals, or material circumstances. Both Rosenwein’s model of ‘emotional communities’ and Szreter’s ‘communication communities’ emphasized how these structures overlap, nest inside one another, and have the potential to prescribe different and even conflicting norms.68 By acknowledging those complex dynamics, these models allow for a more refined, nuanced analysis that recognizes the variegated, uneven dissemination of cultural norms and the historically specific mechanisms of socialization that enabled their propagation.69
The Grand Tour did not just begin and end at the English Channel. It was fully part of eighteenth-century British elite life and frequently operated in ways that were distinct from the broader discourses and fashions circulated about eighteenth-century travel. The Grand Tour therefore offers a snapshot of how elite communities powerfully affected the individual men within them. The routes, society and itineraries of Grand Tours were intimately shaped by an elite man’s family connections, traditions and interests.70 These communities also played a vital role in establishing the standards and ideals of masculinity. Take, for example, the communities that formed around the ‘hardy’ Herbert’s Grand Tour of 1775–80. At its centre was his ‘Triumvirate’ travelling party (the tutors, Coxe and Floyd, plus his manservant, Laurent, and dog, Rover). Through letters, they remained in close contact with another community: his immediate family. Herbert was the only child of Henry Herbert, 10th earl of Pembroke, and Lady Elizabeth, countess of Pembroke. The earls of Pembroke were a long-established, somewhat erratic noble line of avid art collectors and military commanders. The 10th earl was a talented cavalry commander who, in 1762, took his taste for libertinism to the extreme by eloping and having an illegitimate son with ‘Kitty’, the daughter of the MP, Thomas Orby Hunter. In 1763, he was reconciled with Elizabeth, a court beauty famous for her serenity, morality and distinguished conduct. Their marriage remained decidedly fraught and they frequently lived apart.
Beyond this familial circle, Herbert’s letters show that he was part of several social networks based in Britain (these included his illegitimate half-brother, whom Lady Pembroke had raised, his old tutors at Harrow, and friends) as well as overseas. The latter comprised fellow Grand Tourists and older Britons abroad, numerous ambassadors, and members of elite circles in Paris, Vienna and other cities and courts. Each circle subjected Herbert to a range of opinions and expectations regarding elite masculinity. Coxe’s and Floyd’s mutual willingness to undertake more adventurous expeditions deeply influenced Herbert’s emphasis on hardiness. His father’s and Floyd’s military careers similarly shaped his own desire to lay claim to a martial masculinity, while diplomats, particularly Sir William Hamilton (based at the court in Naples) and Sir Robert Murray Keith (posted to Vienna), encouraged him to cultivate performances as a man of science and of urbane cosmopolitanism.
The richness of Grand Tour sources allows for a sustained interrogation of the complicated dynamics between and within such communities. For example, Herbert received conflicting messages from those communities. His mother and Coxe strongly condemned any libertine behaviours, while his father and Floyd actively encouraged and even ordered him to pursue this masculine identity. These conflicting expectations, themselves symptomatic of deeper rifts between his parents, were a source of acute discomfort. Through studying the Grand Tour, it becomes possible to ascertain how individual men like Herbert responded to the expectations placed on them by their social networks, how they reconciled or endured the conflicts, and how they laid claim to certain masculine identities. Widely circulated, closely scrutinized and treated as evidence of a young man’s successes (or failures), the letters, diaries and reports produced by Grand Tourists, tutors and others were a carefully constructed tool in the self-representation of masculinity, and are therefore particularly important in exploring these questions. Chapter 5 examines how the narrative strategies used in recounting experiences of danger were crucial in constructing claims to a variety of masculine ideals. Strikingly, while the majority sought to narrate danger in a manner that laid claim to a hardy martial masculinity, others took the opportunity to reject a stoic, courageous response in favour of describing a more fearful, emotional reaction that supported claims to alternative masculinities. Examining how and why these narratives were achieved, affirmed and even celebrated by influential elite communities gives a fresh insight into how seemingly atypical male performances sat within the multiplicities of elite masculinity.
Rethinking danger
The final theme explored in this book is that of danger. This is considered through examining how an eighteenth-century British elite understanding of risk and danger shaped men’s performances, representations of and attitudes towards masculinity and travel. Masculinity, travel and danger have been intrinsically connected throughout western history. Travel has long featured as a literal and metaphorical part of the masculine coming-of-age process by exposing men to physical, mental and spiritual hardships. The traveller enhanced and demonstrated his masculinity by confronting and overcoming these trials and returning, changed by the journey and its perils. This is a central theme in Homer’s Odyssey, Christ’s forty days in the desert, the knight’s chivalric quest, the adventures of the imperial hero, the writings of modern war correspondents and even the self-presentation of gap year students. Carl Thompson, for example, observed how Romantic travel culture attached a subtle prestige to the traveller who courted adversity. Percy Bysshe Shelley proclaimed that he was fit to write The Revolt of Islam (1818) as ‘dangers which sport upon the brink of precipices have been my playmate; I have trodden the glaciers of the Alps and lived under the eye of Mont Blanc’.71 Even before the mid-century golden age of mountaineering, this activity was seen as a ‘school of courage’ that sought to reach ‘a previously unreached or rarely reached place; a testing of physical ability and mental daring’.72 Exposure to danger, hardship and risk not only cultivated the finest masculine virtues, it also resulted in a revelatory knowledge of the world and self. Yet danger has to date occupied a rather neglected position in the historiography of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour.
Eighteenth-century travel involved multiple physical hazards in the form of accidents, crime, illness, wars and dangerous natural terrains.73 What is more, while the Tour was intended to immerse young elite men in positive continental examples, the effectiveness of this strategy was vehemently contested in many printed publications throughout the period. Here it was argued that European travel corrupted rather than improved its participants. The Grand Tour was depicted as a needlessly dangerous, expensive, unnecessary luxury that exposed young men to numerous moral hazards such as profligacy, gambling, debauchery and drinking. Such corruptive foreign influences would, it was argued, result in effeminacy and affectation, and expose Tourists to perilous political and religious influences, such as Catholicism and the Jacobite cause. This was not just rhetoric. Grand Tourists did sometimes return with mésalliances, wasted fortunes, venereal disease and broken health, or to strained family relationships. On occasion men also died while travelling, sometimes with serious consequences for their family’s lineage. In 1753 Edmund Sheffield, 2nd duke of Buckingham, died of tuberculosis in Rome, aged 19 and without an heir. The dukedom became extinct and the family estates passed to his illegitimate half-brother.74 Despite all this, the Grand Tour remained an extremely popular means of educating heirs.
Scholars have accepted that the Tour was paradoxically ‘deeply necessary and deeply dangerous’, but in seeking to understand its ongoing popularity, historians have sidelined the issue of danger.75 Danger has been cast as a fundamentally negative and disruptive element. As such, the Grand Tour was successful when danger was avoided (war, crime, illness), endured (hardships of the road, terror of mountain passes), and (in the case of moral, social and political hazards) contained via strict behavioural codes enforced by parents’ letters and by tutors.76 This presumption rests on several misconceptions. The first, as chapter 1 explores in detail, is an ahistorical understanding of danger which applies a modern conceptualization of risk to the eighteenth century. The second is an overly simple conflation between the fears raised in public debates about the Grand Tour, and the influence these debates had on Tourists and their families. This relationship needs to be treated with caution. While elite families were aware of the mocking stereotypes and criticisms of the Grand Tour, they did not necessarily take these warnings seriously. Indeed, Grand Tourists often responded to such alarms with a variety of creative parodies. In 1766, returning from a Grand Tour that had begun three years earlier, John Holroyd made a typically mischievous reference to accusations that Tourists would return corrupted by French fashions and manners by observing that, ‘On my arrival [in England] it will be absolutely necessary to give myself some Airs least it shou’d be maliciously observed that I have gained nothing by the Grand Tour’.77 Having left England ‘almost naked’, he knew ‘his friends in London … reasonably shou’d expect some Tinsel as amends for a long absence’, but warned them that customs control meant he would most likely be arriving in mourning clothes.78
A third misconception regarding attitudes to danger brings back ideas of the Tour as a propagator of polite masculinity. Scholars have suggested that the polite man distanced himself from the physically violent, hazardous and therefore uncivilized expressions of masculinity bound up in warfare, duelling, hunting and other sports.79 By extension, the polite man, it was claimed, distanced himself from other perilous activities which would have demanded uncivilized behaviours. Featuring as, to quote John Towner, the ‘enervated, somewhat effeminate traveller’ who ‘usefully counterpoints the manliness and vigour of the Romantic traveller’s activities’ and was part of a leisured class ‘more interested in fine arts and manners’, the eighteenth-century Grand Tourist’s lack of interest in danger has typically been assumed rather than proven in scholarly accounts of travel.80
While many historians have not engaged extensively with travel and danger in the eighteenth century, the literary scholar Chloe Chard’s excellent Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour (1999) provided an admirably full account. However, as her discussion of the role of danger, terror and destabilization was explicitly framed as a literary study of imaginative geography, she approached the topic from a particular perspective that sought to foreground the trends found in the early nineteenth-century romantic movement in eighteenth-century literary writings. As such, Chard explored danger and its accoutrements as rhetorical and linguistic devices in published travel writing that were part of the specific context of the sublime’s aesthetic and philosophical frameworks. In doing so, she implicitly reinforced the association between the traditional Grand Tour and a reluctance to engage with danger. 81
As a historical archival study, this book uses a different perspective and takes the opposite tack in insisting that the Grand Tour occurred precisely because of the difficulties and dangers involved, rather than in spite of them, to the extent that elite society believed the full potential of the Tour could only be unlocked by embracing its risks, dangers and hardships. In doing so, it builds on studies that point to the likelihood of Grand Tourists embracing danger and difficulty. Elizabeth Foyster, for example, has found that non-travel pedagogical literature across the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries consistently advocated hardship and physical training as a fundamental part of male education, because it stimulated a healthy body and the virtues of fortitude and courage. Courage was a particularly important virtue that allowed men to ‘encounter every Danger when necessary’ and ‘to suffer pain with a manly spirit’.82 Elite concepts of honour, cultures of sport and duelling, connections with military and militia leadership, and advice given in educational and conduct literature all viewed danger, hardship and physical risk as essential factors that assisted in cultivating forbearance and manliness.
This has been briefly hinted at by some Grand Tour historiography. Cohen quoted Maximilien Misson’s enthusiastic 1695 description of the ‘wholesome hardships’ of travel and contended that this process toughened the boy into a man, not just a gentleman.83 More recently, French and Rothery have drawn on Chard’s theory of romantic danger, destabilization and discovery of the self in travel, and on Matthew McCormack’s emphasis on the importance of independence for elite masculine status, to argue that elite families ‘recognised that travel was physically and morally perilous, but regarded it as the means by which the full attributes of elite authority, autonomy, civility and power could be realised’.84 The Tour was viewed as ‘a test of their son’s resolve, character, and virtue’ that took positive steps towards filial autonomy.85 These brief arguments provide significant preliminary indications that elite culture and Grand Tour pedagogy held a more complex attitude towards danger than has hitherto been realized.
This book furthers this investigation into the complexity of men’s relationship with peril, and argues that experience of danger and discomfort was considered crucial to the formation of elite masculinity. Central to this argument is the mentality explored in chapter 1: the elite’s attitude towards danger, risk and hazard. The eighteenth-century elite viewed risk as an inherently neutral venture that had as much potential for reward as it did for failure. This, combined with an enduring association between honour and military service, shaped a mentality that cast danger as a challenge to be faced, overcome and endured. Aristocratic culture also maintained a long-held belief that danger and hardship had the capacity to effect positive transformational changes in those who endured them. These perceptions, far from discouraging the perils of travel, inclined eighteenth-century Grand Tourists towards performing an overtly confrontational relationship with the dangers associated with war, sports, the hazards and hardships of travel, and with natural phenomena, such as mountains, glaciers and Vesuvius. In the era of fashionable games of chance, elite families understood the Grand Tour as an enormous, costly jeux de societé; a gamble with the family’s finances, with their sons’ lives and reputations, and with a whole variety of hazards. The outcome could be hugely rewarding or an expensive failure. Yet even the dangers themselves held promise. Dangerous experiences were opportunities for young men to prove their honour, to be refined and purified and to cultivate desired masculine virtues. As such, danger and the formative properties of hardship and peril are a central component in understanding the Grand Tour as a rite of initiation for the next generation of elite British men.
Sources, Grand Tourists, methodologies and chapters
This introductory chapter concludes with a brief commentary on the process of recovering these, and other, experiences when writing a new history of the Grand Tour and of its contribution to the formation of elite gender identity. As Richard Ansell observed, many early historical studies of the Tour are ‘more accurately studies of published travel literature, while pioneering archival work has sometimes risked slipping into anecdote’.86 This tendency to rely on published material, comprising conduct literature, guidebooks, travel writing, caricatures and discussions in periodicals, is problematic for several reasons. First, it constructs a narrative of the Grand Tour that is essentially rooted in cultural representation. Furthermore, questions have been raised about the extent to which these sources targeted and influenced the elite Grand Tourist. Katherine Turner has argued that the majority of published travel writings, and the most stridently critical attacks on the aristocratic Grand Tour, were authored by the middling sorts. Here, the disparagement of the Grand Tourist as a Frenchified, effeminate aristocratic traveller was a weapon in a battle to lay claim to the traits of civic virtue, patriotism and British manliness.87 In this context, declarations of concern over the dangers of corrupting foreign influence often expressed broader anxieties over national identity.88 Moreover, aristocrats and the gentry did not commonly choose to voice their opinions in print – a circumstance which might explain the weak public defence of the Grand Tour – nor were they necessarily keen readers of this literature. As Rosemary Sweet has shown, publications detailing the practicalities of travel were often self-evidently intended for a wider audience of non-elite travellers.89 This information was far less important to travellers who were attended by servants, tutors and diplomats often charged with managing the details of travel for their elite employers and guests.
Of course, this is not to say that Grand Tourists avoided published travel literature. Letters, diaries and financial records contain many references to influential texts, including Addison’s Remarks on Italy (1705), Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Nouvelle Héloïse (1761) and Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey (1768).90 But the relationship between these texts, how individuals read them, and how they experienced and remembered their own travels, was far from straightforward.91 Analysis of Tourists’ reading and book-collecting patterns is proof of this, in demonstrating that their tastes went well beyond the canon of travel literature.92 On their respective tours of 1775–9 and 1777–9, for example, George, Viscount Lewisham and Philip Yorke read political and legal works. Both were instructed to read Johann Jakob Schmauss’s Corpus juris publici Germanici academicum (1722), the works of the seventeenth-century Dutch jurist, Hugo Grotius, and a range of works dealing with modern political and constitutional histories and the rights of ambassadors.93 These and other Grand Tour references to reading habits indicate that Tourists and their families were frequently interested in topics and itineraries that received little attention in contemporary travel literature.
To fully appreciate the Grand Tour, it needs to be approached from the perspective of aristocratic and gentry families. This requires a careful consideration of the alternative knowledge-sharing practices used by these communities. The Tour was an inter-generational event, undertaken by sons, fathers, grandfathers, uncles and cousins, and within families who also had wider traditions of men and women travelling to the continent for purposes of diplomacy, health and pleasure. Families therefore contained an impressive store of collective travel experience and knowledge, which was passed from generation to generation via conversation, letters and privately circulated manuscripts. These exchanges drew on networks of family, friends and acquaintances that often sprawled across Europe. As Ansell put it, elite families prized advice ‘bestowed by authoritative individuals’ over ‘vicarious encounters with reading’.94 Analysing elite understanding of the purpose and justifications of the Grand Tour and gaining a more accurate sense of its young men’s activities, therefore, requires a shift in emphasis from published material towards sets of largely unpublished but often internally circulated writings.95
Masculinity and Danger on the Eighteenth-Century Grand Tour is an expressly archival study. As Hannah Grieg has noted, the eighteenth-century elite left ‘a paper mountain rather than a paper trail’, making it a challenge for the historian ‘to select appropriately from an overwhelming mass of extant material’.96 The book’s selections from this paper mountain use three key criteria: first, archival sources relating to Grand Tours which took place in the period 1700–80; second, records that document a full Grand Tour itinerary lasting several years, covering destinations in France, the Netherlands, the German principalities, Austria, Switzerland and Italy; and third, material relating to Tourists in their late teens and/or early twenties, and who were the sons and/or heirs of aristocratic and/or gentry families. Focusing on the theme of danger has further assisted in narrowing down the selection. The book pays particular attention to Grand Tours that took place during conflicts and/or episodes of widespread disease, and to stages of travel known for their perilous nature, such as the crossing of Alpine passes. It focuses on instances in the source material of young men’s exposure to and engagement with various types of (largely physical) hazard, to related activities that had their roots in risk, and to how these experiences were narrated, remembered, policed and embellished. Through this, the book seeks to avoid ascribing to preconceptions of the importance of certain masculinities or destinations.
These criteria result in an argument built on a close analysis of over thirty Grand Tour parties, which produced sources that include diaries, memoirs and correspondence with fathers, mothers, aunts and uncles, siblings, friends and other members of society. The book has also drawn on visual sources, particularly commissioned Grand Tour portraiture and depictions of Vesuvius. These have been considered within the context of a wider range of eighteenth-century literatures, including pedagogical and conduct guides. The book has made little use of the typical canon of eighteenth-century travel literature, but there is the occasional exception in its survey of published writings based on these Grand Tours. These include William Windham and Peter Martel’s 1744 pamphlet, An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy, and the Revd William Coxe’s highly popular publications, Sketches of the Natural, Civil, and Political State of Swisserland (1779), Travels into Poland, Russia, Sweden, and Denmark (1784) and Travels in Switzerland (1789), which were based on the Grand Tour undertaken with Herbert.
This book’s analysis of these Grand Tours and their sources is informed by the theoretical understanding of gender as both a construct that is reported and narrated using certain rhetorical devices, and a performance that involved physical actions, behaviours and habits. As Laura Engel observed, eighteenth-century practices of self-representation used a ‘variety of discourses that worked dialectically to construct their public persona’.97 Often widely circulated beyond their named recipients, correspondence, diaries and journals were, as Catriona Kennedy emphasized, ‘a highly crafted, rhetorical act, a social performance that staged the self for a particular audience’ that ‘can be viewed neither as repositories of raw, unmediated experience nor as the private outpourings of an authentic self ’.98 As the principal means of communication during the Grand Tour, the familiar letter and travel journal undoubtedly acted ‘as key cultural sites for the construction of the self ’ and this book has analysed them as such.99 At the same time, it also steps beyond this. Scholars such as Dror Wahrman and Lyndal Roper have recently called for cultural history, and the history of gender more broadly, to be ‘re-embodied’.100 This call makes bold claims for a theoretical and methodological approach that moves beyond representation and into experience.101 In response, this book uses these sources to identify the performative elements of the Grand Tour. It looks at what, when, where and how elite young men undertook certain activities, and in doing so, it seeks to highlight how a set of physical things, experiences and environments were used in creating identity through the process of ‘doing’ as well as narrating. In exploring how these activities were rationalized and understood by elite society, the book undertakes a close narratological and rhetorical reading of correspondence, diaries and other sources with an eye to exploring how experience, performance and conceptual understanding met in the narratives that Tourists subsequently constructed.
The majority of these sources were not written with the intention of laying out the authors’ perceptions of masculinity, danger or the Grand Tour. Distilling the often-oblique discourses in play has therefore been a matter of collecting fragments, hints and even silences from multiple sources. When brought together, these fragmentary, occasional commentaries reveal a remarkably coherent and continuous body of opinion within the eighteenth-century elite community. Throughout the book, examples are quoted that most clearly and fully articulate what was often only elusively present in other texts. As such, certain Grand Tours are more heavily represented than others. In chronological order, some of the most frequently referenced Tours are those of the two heirs of the twice-married Hans William Bentinck, 1st earl of Portland, an influential Anglo-Dutch politician and close adviser to William of Orange. In 1701–3, Portland’s eldest son from his first marriage, Henry Bentinck, Lord Woodstock, undertook his Grand Tour during the War of Spanish Succession, with his tutor, Paul de Rapin de Thoyras. In 1716, he inherited his father’s English estates and was created the 1st duke of Portland. In 1719, the eldest son of the first earl’s second marriage, William Bentick, 1st Count Bentinck, was sent to Leiden University, before undertaking a Grand Tour (1725–8) with his tutor, Moses Bernege. Bentinck inherited his father’s Dutch lordships of Rhoon and Pendrecht.
Other key case studies are drawn from Tours that took place during the start of the War of Austrian Succession in the late 1730s and early 1740s. During this period, a set of English, Scottish and German Tourists and tutors congregated in Geneva, Switzerland, calling themselves the Common Room club. In addition to attending the city’s university and fashionable society, club members entered into ‘amicable or literary discourses’, theatricals, and scientific and sporting pursuits, including climbing the Chamonix glacier in 1741. The Common Room’s core members were a mixture of wealthy English landed gentry (the brashly confident William Windham of Felbrigg, Norfolk; the athletic, artistic Robert Price of Foxley, Herefordshire; Richard Aldworth Neville of Billingbear, Berkshire, who married Magdalen Calendrini, daughter of the first syndic of Geneva; and Benjamin Tate, about whom little is known), and Scottish and German nobility. Among the latter were Thomas Hamilton, 7th earl of Haddington, and his brother, George Hamilton Baillie; and William, count of Schaumburg-Lippe, and his brother George. The club also included their tutors who were men of considerable intellectual ability, among them Benjamin Stillingfleet, a talented scientist who later applied the Linnaean system to botany, Thomas Dampier, who became a master at Eton and dean of Durham Cathedral, and the Revd John Williamson, whose mathematical talents were widely respected.
Travelling around the same time, between 1739–41, was Horace Walpole, the younger son of the powerful Whig prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole. Walpole was not accompanied by a tutor, but instead travelled with his cousin Sir Henry Seymour Conway and his Eton companion, the poet Thomas Gray. After the party left France, Conway branched off onto his own route that took him to Geneva, Paris and back home by 1740. Walpole and Gray journeyed across Italy together, until a severe quarrel led Gray to return home alone and Walpole to travel with Henry Fiennes Pelham-Clinton, 9th earl of Lincoln, and his tutor, Joseph Spence. Lincoln and Spence were also abroad from 1739–41, during which time Lincoln became an enthusiastic student at Turin’s Accademia Reale for six months, fell in love with Lady Sophia Fermor, rescued Walpole from a near-fatal illness, and enjoyed Paris at the outbreak of the War of Austrian Succession. By the start of his tour, aged nineteen, Lincoln had been orphaned and was his late parents’ sole surviving child. Part of a sprawling and powerful political family, he was under the guardianship of, and eventually became heir to, the influential Whig foreign minister, Thomas Pelham-Holles, 1st duke of Newcastle. Newcastle was also one of several guardians to Charles Lennox, the 3rd duke of Richmond, Lennox and Aubigny (in the French nobility) during Lennox’s Grand Tour of 1752–5. Descended from Charles II and his mistress Louise de Kéroualle, the 3rd duke succeeded his father in 1750 and went on to an energetic career in politics, the military and as a patron of the arts and sciences. His Tour started with a long period in Geneva, and took place under the tutelage of the biologist, Abraham Trembley and in the company of his younger brother, Lord George Lennox.
Travelling between 1763 and 1766, John Holroyd was from less lofty origins. He was the second son of an ambitious Anglo-Irish family of lower gentry and abandoned a military career during the Seven Years War after his older brother was killed in action in 1762. Holroyd was heir to the estates of his maternal uncle, and eventually became the 1st Earl Sheffield. During his Tour, Holroyd favoured his uncle, the Revd Jones Baker, and other family members with a mischievous, frank correspondence that described everything from his raptures at seeing Frederick the Great of Prussia to his hunt for prostitutes. The last three Tours featuring regularly in this book are those of men who have already been introduced: first, that of George Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 3rd earl of Dartmouth, who travelled in 1775–9 with his younger brothers, William and Charles, and their tutor, David Stevenson; second, the tour of Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke who travelled in 1777–9, with his tutor Colonel Wettstein; and, third, that of George Augustus Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke, who travelled in 1775–80, with his tutors, Revd William Coxe and Captain John Floyd, his servant, Laurent the Bold, and his dog, Rover.
The social world of the eighteenth-century elite was not a large one and it is worth remembering that almost all of the Grand Tourists and tutors mentioned here and throughout the book were known to each other, through blood, marriage or social connections. This spilt over into their Grand Tours as well. Richmond’s Tour during the 1750s, for example, overlapped with those of Henry Herbert, 10th earl of Pembroke, Frederick North, later 2nd earl of Guilford, and William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth. One generation later, their sons – George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke; George Legge, Viscount Lewisham, later 3rd earl of Dartmouth; together with the sons of Lord North and Philip Yorke – undertook their own overlapping Grand Tours during the 1770s, having also all attended Westminster School around the same time as one another. The ideals, performances and constructions of elite men were therefore presented to a relatively small pool of peers. How these men individually navigated the Grand Tour, together with the implications of these strategies for personal masculinity and collective elite social identity, is the subject of the chapters that follow.
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1 For scholarly discussions of the Grand Tour as a form of initiation, see B. Redford, Venice and the Grand Tour (New Haven, Conn. and London, 1996), pp. 7–9, 14–15; M. Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), pp. 54–63; R. Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c.1690– 1820 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 23–5.
2 H. Greig, The Beau Monde: Fashionable Society in Georgian London (Oxford, 2013), pp. 24–5; S. Conway, England, Ireland and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2011), ch. 7.
3 British Library (Brit. Libr.)., Add. MS. 34874 C, ‘Memoirs of the life and writings of Edward Gibbon, written c. 1789–90’, fos. 29–30.
4 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34874 C, ‘Memoirs of the life and writings of Edward Gibbon, written c. 1789–90’, fos. 29–30.
5 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, p. 130.
6 Redford, Venice, pp. 8–9, 16.
7 J. Wilton-Ely, ‘‘‘Classical ground”: Britain, Italy and the Grand Tour’, Eighteenth-Century Life, xxvii (2004), 136–65, at p. 152.
8 J. Burke, ‘The Grand Tour and the rule of taste’, in Studies in the Eighteenth Century, ed. R. F. Brissenden (Canberra, 1968), p. 234.
9 D. Porter, Haunted Journeys: Desire and Transgression in European Travel Writing (Princeton, N.J., 1991), pp. 35, 140; M. Myrone, Bodybuilding: Reforming Masculinities in British Art, 1750–1810 (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2005), p. 48.
10 Redford, Venice, pp. 8–9.
11 Sweet, Cities, pp. 5, 24, 109–11; C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), pp. 20–2.
12 See L. Klein, ‘The third earl of Shaftesbury and the progress of politeness’, Eighteenth Century Studies, xviii (1984), 186–214, at pp. 186–8, 190–1; L. Klein, ‘Politeness and the interpretation of the British eighteenth century’, Historical Journal, xlv (2002), 869–98, at p. 881; for politeness as a dominant expression of masculinity, see A. Bryson, From Courtesy to Civility: Changing Codes of Conduct in Early Modern England (Oxford, 1998); P. Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, Britain, 1660–1800 (Harlow, 2001).
13 See Klein, ‘Politeness’, pp. 42, 45.
14 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, pp. 63, 12, 38–9; Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, pp. 72–4, 77, 166. As Cohen and others have noted, this was problematic as the French were also perceived as overly refined and effeminate.
15 See, e.g., Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity; Cohen, ‘The Grand Tour: constructing the English gentleman in eighteenth-century France’, History of Education, xxi (1992), 241–57; M. Cohen, ‘Manliness, effeminacy and the French: gender and the construction of national character in eighteenth-century England’, in English Masculinities, 1660–1800, ed. T. Hitchcock and M. Cohen (London, 1999), pp. 44–62.
16 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 152, Holroyd, Chambery, to Mrs Atkinson, 17 July 1764.
17 Staffordshire Record Office (SRO), D(W)1778/V/874, Georges Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 3rd earl of Dartmouth, Paris, to William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, 22 Dec. [1775].
18 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 3 Jan. 1776.
19 See e.g., J. Bepler, ‘Travelling and posterity: the archive, the library and the cabinet’, in Grand Tour: Adeliges Reisen und Europaïsche Kultur vom 14. bis zum 18. Jahrhundert, ed. R. Babel and W. Paravicini (Ostfildern, 2005); A. Brundin and D. Roberts, ‘Book-buying and the Grand Tour: the Italian books at Belton House in Lincolnshire’, The Library, xvi (2015), 51–79; M. McCormack, ‘Dance and drill: polite accomplishments and military masculinities in Georgian Britain’, Cultural and Social History, viii (2011), 315–30.
20 J. M. Kelly, The Society of the Dilettanti: Archaeology and Identity in the British Enlightenment (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2009), pp. 17–18. See also ch. 1 in general.
21 S. Conway, England, Ireland and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2011), pp. 192–3, 213.
22 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36258, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke’s Grand Tour journal, 31 Oct. 1777.
23 London Metropolitan Archives (LMA), Acc. 510/242, William Whitehead, Hanover, to William Villiers, 3rd earl of Jersey, 7 June 1755.
24 E. Chalus, ‘Elite women, social politics, and the political world of late eighteenth-century England’, Historical Journal, xliv (2000), 669–98, at p. 672.
25 S. Goldsmith, ‘The social challenge: northern and central European societies on the eighteenth-century aristocratic Grand Tour’, in Beyond the Grand Tour: Northern Metropolises and Early Modern Travel Behaviour, ed. R. Sweet, G. Verhoeven and S. Goldsmith (London, 2017), pp. 65–82.
26 See E. Chodějovská and Z.Hojda, ‘Abroad, or still “at home”? Young noblemen from the Czech lands and the empire in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries’ and M. S. Leibetseder, ‘Between specialisation and encyclopaedic knowledge: educational travelling and court culture in early eighteenth-century Germany’, in Sweet, Verhoeven and Goldsmith, Beyond the Grand Tour, pp. 83–107 and 108–24; P. Bianchi, ‘La caccia nell’educazione del gentiluomo. Il caso sabaudo (sec. XVI–XVIII)’, in La caccia nello Stato sabaudo I. Caccia e cultura (secc. XVI–XVIII), ed. P. Bianchi and P. Passerin d’Entrèves (Turin, 2010), pp. 19–37; P. Bianchi, ‘Una palestra di arti cavalleresche e di politica. Presenze austro-tedesche all’Accademia Reale di Torino nel Settecento’, in Le corti come luogo di comunicazione: gli Asburgo e l’Italia (secoli XVI–XIX), ed. M. Bellabarba and J. P. Niederkorn (Berlin, 2010), pp. 135–53.
27 R. Ansell, ‘Educational travel in Protestant families from post-Restoration Ireland’, Historical Journal, lviii (2015), 931–58, at pp. 938–9.
28 See the Dartmouth papers in SRO, D(W)1778 for Grand Tour letters from all three sons.
29 R. Ansell, ‘Foubert’s academy: British and Irish elite formation in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Paris and London’, in Sweet, Verhoeven and Goldsmith, Beyond the Grand Tour, pp. 46–64; Bianchi, ‘La caccia’, pp. 19–37; Bianchi, ‘Una palestra’, pp. 135–53; P. Bianchi, ‘The British at the Turin Royal Academy: cosmopolitanism and religious pragmatism’, in Turin and the British in the Age of the Grand Tour, ed. P. Bianchi and K. Wolfe (Cambridge, 2017), pp. 91–107, 399–410.
30 J. Gallagher, ‘The Italian London of John North: cultural contact and linguistic encounter in early modern England’, Renaissance Quarterly, lxx (2017), 88–131, at pp. 91, 95–6, 141; J. Gallagher, ‘‘‘Ungratefull Tuscans”: teaching Italian in early modern England’, The Italianist, xxxvi (2016), 394–413, at p. 404.
31 Goldsmith, ‘The social challenge’, p. 74. For further comments on immersive and experiential learning in the eighteenth century, see P. Borsay, ‘Children, adolescents and fashionable urban society in eighteenth-century England’, in Fashioning Childhood in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A Müller (Aldershot, 2006), pp. 53–62.
32 M. Scheer, ‘Are emotions a kind of practice (and is that what makes them have history)? A Bourdieuian approach to understanding emotion’, History and Theory, li (2012), 193–220, at p. 209.
33 The prescriptive nature of these expectations also allows the Tour to be viewed as an emotional regime in which certain emotional reactions were prescribed and punished. See W. Reddy, The Navigation of Feeling: a Framework for the History of Emotions (Cambridge, 2001).
34 S. Goldsmith, ‘Nostalgia, homesickness and emotional formation on the eighteenth-century Grand Tour’, Cultural and Social History, xv (2018), 333–60.
35 For two widely different approaches to Britain’s relationship with the continent, see L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (London, 1992), p. 166 and S. Conway, England, Ireland and Continental Europe in the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2011), pp. 192–213.
36 K. Harvey and A. Shepard, ‘What have historians done with masculinity? Reflections on five centuries of British history, circa 1500–1950’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2005), 274–80, at p. 276; J. Tosh, ‘The history of masculinity: an outdated concept?’, in What is Masculinity?, ed. J. H. Arnold and S. Brady (London, 2011), p. 22.
37 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 76–81. For a good summary of how historians of masculinity have interpreted this model, see A. Shepard, ‘From anxious patriarchs to refined gentlemen: manhood in early modern Britain, c. 1500–1700’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2005), 281–95, at pp. 290–1; and B. Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinity as a historical problem’, Gender and History, xxx (2018), 377–400, at pp. 378–9.
38 Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, p. 8; M. Cohen, ‘“Manners” make the man: politeness, chivalry and the construction of masculinity, 1750–1830’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2005), 312–29, at p. 312.
39 For literature refining the polite paradigm, see P. Langford, ‘The uses of eighteenth-century politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xii (2002), 311–31; and R. Sweet, ‘Topographies of politeness’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xii (2002), 355–74. For literature challenging the paradigm of politeness, see H. Berry, ‘Rethinking politeness in eighteenth-century England: Moll King’s coffee house and the significance of “flash talk”’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, xi (2001), 65–81; and S. Dickie, Cruelty and Laughter: Forgotten Comic Literature and the Unsentimental Eighteenth Century (Chicago, Ill., 2011).
40 For critiques of the thesis of the polite gentleman, see K. Harvey, ‘Ritual encounters: punch parties and masculinity in the eighteenth century’, Past and Present, ccxiv (2012), 165–203; K. Davison, ‘Occasional politeness and gentlemen’s laughter in eighteenth-century England’, Historical Journal, lvii (2014), 921–45.
41 See, e.g., Kelly, The Society of Dilettanti; M. McCormack, The Independent Man: Citizenship and Gender Politics in Georgian England (Manchester, 2005) and McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford, 2015); Cohen, ‘“Manners” make the man’; K. Downing, ‘The gentleman boxer: boxing, manners, and masculinity in eighteenth-century England’, Men and Masculinities, xii (2010), 328–52; P. McNeil, ‘Macaroni masculinities’, Fashion Theory, iv (2000), 373–403.
42 See, e.g., S. Banks, A Polite Exchange of Bullets: the Duel and the English Gentlemen, 1750–1850 (Woodbridge, 2010); K. Harvey, Reading Sex in the Eighteenth Century: Bodies and Gender in English Erotic Culture (Cambridge, 2004); J. M. Kelly, ‘Riots, revelries, and rumour: libertinism and masculine association in enlightenment London’, Journal of British Studies, xlv (2006), 759–95, at pp. 774–5; V. Gatrell, City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (London, 2006).
43 For just a few examples of this rapidly growing literature, see K. Harvey, The Little Republic: Masculinity and Domestic Authority in Eighteenth-Century Britain (Oxford, 2012); H. Barker, ‘Soul, purse and family: middling and lower-class masculinity in eighteenth-century Manchester’, Social History, xxxi (2008), 12–35; J. Begiato, ‘Tears and the manly sailor in England, c. 1760–1860’, Journal for Maritime Research, xvii (2015), 117–33; and ‘“A very sensible man”: imagining fatherhood in England c. 1750–1830’, History, xcv (2010), 267–92; H. French and M. Rothery, ‘Male anxiety among younger sons of the English landed gentry, 1700–1900’, Historical Journal, lxii (2018), 1–29.
44 For an excellent summary of the scholarship adhering to this, see K. Harvey, ‘The history of masculinity, c. 1650–1800’, Journal of British Studies, xliv (2005), 298–305.
45 See, e.g., Cohen, ‘“Manners” make the man’.
46 See, e.g., the arguments explored by Hitchcock and Cohen throughout English Masculinities, 1660–1800.
47 J. Tosh, ‘Hegemonic masculinity and the history of gender’, in Masculinity in Politics and War: Gendering Modern History, ed. S. Dudink, K. Hagemann and J. Tosh (Manchester, 2004), p. 52; Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, p. 377.
48 Connell, Masculinities, p. 77, quoted in Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, p. 383.
49 Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, p. 384.
50 Harvey and Shepard, ‘What have historians done?’, pp. 275–6, 280.
51 See the work of J. Butler and also J. W. Scott, ‘The evidence of experience’, Critical Inquiry, xvii (1991), 773–97.
52 Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinity’, p. 391.
53 See, e.g., the work of K. Harvey, J. Begiato, A. Vickery, H. Barker, H. French and M. Rothery.
54 P. Carter, ‘James Boswell’s manliness’, in English Masculinities, pp. 111–30, 129–30.
55 Shepard, ‘Anxious patriarchs’, p. 291.
56 Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinities’, pp. 384, 392–4.
57 See Cohen, ‘“Manners” make the man’.
58 See ch. 1 for a fuller discussion of this and the relevant literature.
59 ‘hardy, adj.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/84203?rskey=aj88M3&result=2&isAdvanced=false> [accessed 15 Aug. 2014].
60 Wiltshire and Swindon History Centre (WSHC), MS. 2057/F5/7, George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke’s Grand Tour journal, 1 Dec. 1779.
61 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/7, George Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke’s Grand Tour journal, 1 Dec. 1779.
62 See Goldsmith, ‘The social challenge’, for further discussion of this.
63 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 143, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke, Vienna, to Philip Yorke, 2nd earl of Hardwicke, 11 Feb. 1778. Note that while his turn of phrase suggests that this adaptable behaviour should be seen as the embodiment of polite sociability, it is important to remember that adaptability took men well beyond the boundaries of refined masculinity.
64 H. French and M. Rothery, Man’s Estate: Landed Gentry Masculinities, 1660–1900 (Oxford, 2012), pp. 11–15, 37.
65 For the fullest treatment of this argument, see the introduction and conclusion of French and Rothery, Man’s Estate.
66 French and Rothery, Man’s Estate, pp. 16, 18–19, 105–7; French and Rothery, ‘“Upon your entry into the world”: masculine values and the threshold of adulthood among landed elites in England 1680–1800’, Social History, xxxiii (2008), 402–22, at p. 421.
67 S. Szreter and K. Fisher, Sex Before the Sexual Revolution: Intimate Life in England 1918–1963 (Cambridge, 2010), pp. 21–2.
68 S. Szreter, Fertility, Class and Gender in Britain 1860–1940 (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 546–7; B. H. Rosenwein, ‘Worrying about emotions in history’, American Historical Review, cvii (2002), 821–45, at p. 842.
69 For an exploration of how this could be applied to the history of masculinity, see Griffin, ‘Hegemonic masculinities’, pp. 385–6.
70 Goldsmith, ‘The social challenge’, p. 75.
71 Quoted in C. Thompson, The Suffering Traveller and the Romantic Imagination (Oxford, 2007), p. 7.
72 See, e.g., S. Bainbridge, ‘Writing from the perilous ridge: romanticism and the invention of rock climbing’, Romanticism, xix (2013), 246–60; S. Bainbridge, ‘Romantics and mountaineering’, Romanticism, xviii (2012), 1–15. For literature on 19th-century cultural attitudes towards danger and travel, see P. H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man (Cambridge, Mass., 2013); and E. Freedgood, Victorian Writing about Risk: Imagining a Safe England in a Dangerous World (Cambridge, 2000).
73 Capturing the ‘ardour of travel’ via extensive archival research, Jeremy Black outlined what these often briefly referenced hazards actually were in The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992), chs. 2, 4, 7, 8, 9, 13.
74 For this and other examples, see N. Stanley-Price, ‘See Rome – and die: legacies of the Grand Tour in a Roman cemetery’, in The Legacies of the Grand Tour: New Essays on Travel, Literature, and Culture, ed. L. Colletta (Lanham, Mass., 2015), pp. 169–85.
75 See Redford, Venice, p. 9; Black, British Abroad, p. 334; Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, p. 57.
76 For traditional takes on danger, see R. Hudson, The Grand Tour, 1592–1796 (London, 1993), pp. 16, 18; R. S. Lambert, Grand Tour: a Journey in the Tracks of the Age of Aristocracy (New York, 1937), pp. 57–8, 42.
77 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 185, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, Hanover, to Revd Dr Baker, 23 Dec. 1765.
78 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 187, Holroyd, The Hague, to Mrs Baker, 10 Jan. 1766.
79 E.g., Carter, Men and the Emergence of Polite Society, pp. 1, 70–2.
80 J. Towner, ‘The English tourist and war, 1500– 1800’, in War and Tourism, ed. R. Butler and W. Suntikul (London, 2013), p. 50; Thompson, Suffering Traveller, pp. 48–51.
81 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, pp. 11, 114–16, 137–93.
82 E. Foyster, ‘Boys will be boys: manhood and aggression, 1660– 1800’, in English Masculinities, pp. 153, 176.
83 Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity, p. 58.
84 French and Rothery, Man’s Estate, pp. 140– 1.
85 French and Rothery, Man’s Estate, pp. 143, 148.
86 Ansell, ‘Educational travel’, p. 937.
87 K. Turner, British Travel Writers in Europe, 1750–1800: Authorship, Gender and National Identity (Aldershot, 2001), pp. 16–17, 46.
88 For an important examination of this, see S. Warneke, Images of the Educational Traveller in Early Modern England (Leiden, 1995).
89 Sweet, Cities, pp. 7, 14. For an excellent wider discussion of the nature of many of the sources left by 18th-century travellers, see pp. 13– 20.
90 Horace Walpole, Sienna, to Richard West, 22 March 1740 and Walpole, Florence, to West, 2 March 1740, in The Yale Edition of Horace Walpole’s Correspondence, ed. W. S. Lewis (48 vols., New Haven, Conn., 1937–), xiii. 204, 213; Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fos. 130–131, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, Lausanne, to Revd Dr Baker, 20 Oct. 1763; SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Calais, to Dartmouth, 3 May 1777.
91 R. Ansell, ‘Reading and writing travels: Maximilien Misson, Samuel Waring and the afterlives of European voyages, c. 1687– 1714’, English Historical Review, cxxxiii (2018), 1446–77.
92 M. D. Sánchez-Jáuregui, ‘Books on the Westmorland’, in The English Prize: the Capture of the Westmorland, an Episode of the Grand Tour, ed. M. D. Sánchez-Jáuregui and S. Wilcox (New Haven, Conn. and London, 2013), pp. 144–53. See also WSHC, MS. 2057/H5/5-7, ‘Wiltshire house library catalogues from 1735 and 1773’; MS. 2057/H5/9, ‘Wiltshire house library family and friend’s lending record’.
93 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, Sandwell, to Lewisham, 28 Sept. 1776; Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 5, Yorke, The Hague, to Hardwicke, 10 Jan. 1777; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 29, Yorke, The Hague, to Hardwicke, 28 May 1777; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 45, Yorke, The Hague, to Hardwicke, 25 May 1777; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 109, Yorke, Vienna, to Hardwicke, 21 Nov. 1777; Add. MS. 35378, fo. 168, Yorke, Vienna, to Hardwicke, 15 Apr. 1779.
94 R. Ansell, ‘Irish Protestant travel to Europe, 1660– 1727’ (unpublished University of Oxford DPhil thesis, 2013), p. 71.
95 See Black, British Abroad, pp. v–vii and Bepler, ‘Travelling and posterity’, pp. 192–3 on the importance of manuscript accounts. Much of the new body of work in travel history is more archival in focus. For examples, see Sweet, Cities and G. Verhoeven, Europe Within Reach: Netherlandish Travellers on the Grand Tour and Beyond (1585–1750) (Brill, 2015).
96 Greig, Beau Monde, p. 29.
97 L. Engel, Fashioning Celebrity: Eighteenth-Century British Actresses and Strategies for Image Making (Columbus, O., 2016), pp. 2, 4, 21.
98 C. Kennedy, Narratives of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars: Military and Civilian Experience in Britain and Ireland (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 12, 14, 16; See also S. M. Fitzmaurice, The Familiar Letter in Early Modern English: a Pragmatic Approach (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, Pa., 2002), pp. 1–2, 234; 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.
99 R. Earle, ‘Introduction: letters, writers and historians’, in Epistolary Selves: Letters and Letter Writers, 1600–1945, ed. R. Earle (Aldershot, 1999), p. 2.
100 D. Wahrman, ‘Change and the corporeal in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century gender history: or, can cultural history be rigorous?’, Gender & History, xx (2008), 584–602; L. Roper, ‘Beyond discourse theory’, Women’s History Review, xix (2010), 307–19. For examples of this approach applied to 18th-century masculinity and femininity, see McCormack, Independent Man, p. 37; Engel, Fashioning Celebrity, introduction.
101 Scott, ‘The evidence of experience’.