4. Fire and ice: mountains, glaciers and volcanoes

When traversing Mount Cenis in August 1764, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, spied Rocciamelone, believed then to be one of the highest peaks in the Alps. In a letter to his aunt, Holroyd noted that ‘Some imagine Hannibal encouraged his Army by The View of Italy from thence’, though the young traveller was sceptical ‘that a good General wou’d fatigue his Army by marching up such a mountain for the sake of a prospect’.¹ As recounted by Livy and Polybius, the exploits of Hannibal and the Carthaginian army during the Second Punic War (218–201 BC) were well known to Grand Tourists. Alongside reflecting on Hannibal’s passage through the Alps, they and other eighteenth-century travellers commented frequently on the Carthaginians’ famous victories against the Roman Republic as they journeyed through the Italian landscape.²

Eighteenth-century tourists were equally interested in Hannibal’s failures. Unable to bring an increasingly wary Roman army to battle, Hannibal had been forced to make his winter headquarters in Capua, a city sixteen miles north of Naples. Here, Livy alleged, he met his downfall not through violence, but luxury and indolence. Seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travellers were fascinated by the role played by Capua and the fertile Italian south in the Carthaginian general’s decline. In 1617, Fynes Moryson described ‘The Capuan delights’ as a world-renowned ‘earthly Parardise’ famous for ‘corrupting the Army of Hanniball’.³ Just over fifty years later, in 1670, Richard Lassels elaborated that ‘It was this country which with its delights, broke Hannibals army; which neither snow could coole, nor Alpes stop, nor Romans Vanquish’.⁴ By the eighteenth century, travellers talked less about the fall of Hannibal’s army, and focused more directly on the general himself. In 1726, for example, John Breval described how Hannibal had become ‘infected with the vice of the country’ and ‘gave himself up to ease and pleasure leading to his own downfall’.⁵ In 1744, Charles Thompson concurred: ‘the famous Hannibal wasted his Time, and debauched his Army’ at Capua. As a consequence of the general’s individual failings, ‘the Romans recover’d from the Consternation into which they had been thrown’ and ‘obliged him to abandon Italy’.⁶

For eighteenth-century Grand Tourists, Hannibal was both an exemplary figure of classical renown and a grim warning. He was a great general of antiquity and one of history’s foremost military strategists, yet he lost his identity, purpose and vigour when on the cusp of victory. Shaped by contemporary beliefs that climate and environment powerfully affected human temperament, identity and physical health, eighteenth-century commentators placed considerably emphasis on where Hannibal’s actions took place. The general endured and triumphed in the cold snowy heights of the Alps and fell in the luxurious richness of the Italian south. In ascribing Hannibal’s failures to the corruptive allure of luxury and an easeful climate, commentators linked the general to the persistent fear that undertaking a Grand Tour would result in the loss of one’s own identity through a prolonged exposure to negative foreign influences.⁷ Was it possible for elite young men to absorb the best of sophisticated, cosmopolitan Europe and the classical past, while also retaining their Britishness? A consideration of how Grand Tourists responded to the cautionary tale of Hannibal provides insight into how they also responded to the risk of losing their own identity during their travels abroad. As with Hannibal, the combination of place and performance – particularly how they performed in response to the topographies, climates and dangers of the Alpine mountains and glaciers and Vesuvius and the Italian south – was key.

As the most accessible active volcano in Europe, Vesuvius exercised an enormous draw upon travellers. An ascent of its flanks had been a fixture in travellers’ itineraries of Naples since at least the late seventeenth century.⁸ In contrast, the mountains and glaciers of the Alps only came into vogue in the mid to late eighteenth century. During the 1760s and 1770s, Alpine touristic infrastructures rapidly developed.⁹ The first inn built at Chamonix, at the base of Mont Blanc, opened in 1764, with excursions to the glaciers costing three shillings. By 1780, the village had three inns catering for more than 1,500 visitors per annum.¹⁰ Eighteenth-century touristic engagement with these sites of natural phenomena is typically associated with the conceptual framework of the sublime and the subsequent rise of romantic travel culture. From late seventeenth-century translations of the Greek critic, Dionysius Longinus, to Edmund Burke’s widely-read Philosophical Enquiry (1757) and the romantic writers of the early nineteenth century, Alpine landscapes and Mount Vesuvius were identified as a crucial source of the sublime.¹¹ The latter was an affective, transformative, irresistible glimpse of infinity that overwhelmed the mind, body and soul and largely defeated attempts to express the experience.¹² Crucially, the sublime was conceptualized as a distanced, physically safe encounter in which the ‘eyes and ears [remained] the only inlet’.¹³ As Burke stated, ‘When danger or pain press too nearly, they are incapable of giving any delight, and are simply terrible; but at certain distances, and with certain modifications … they are delightful’.¹⁴ This was, therefore, primarily a visual, aesthetic and philosophical encounter with landscape, taken in from carriages and viewing points. The presumption in much existing literature is that, in chasing the sublime, Grand Tourists did not cling to the rocks themselves.

Despite the need for physical safety, romantic travel literature emphasized that the sublime and its counterpart, beauty, could be dangerously destabilizing to the mind and the self. Crossing the Alps was a ‘behavioural transgression’ which, in moving across boundaries from north to south, invited a disruptive encounter.¹⁵ Chloe Chard has mapped how late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century romantic travel writers increasingly embraced these narratives of transgression and destabilization in their travel writing and their engagement with the Alps and Vesuvius. Within this, she explored how Hannibal’s crossing of the Alps was seen as an act of aspiration and self-affirmation. ‘The Carthaginian’s qualities of sublime aspiration’ were tied to ‘the sublimity of the landscape, which, in its vastness and wildness, tests and confirms this aspiration’.¹⁶ In contrast, the destabilizing effeminization that Hannibal experienced in the warm south warned of the ‘perilous allurements to be encountered by the contemporary traveller in Italy’.¹⁷

This chapter offers a substantially different reading of how the pre-Romantic eighteenth-century Grand Tourists engaged with the Alps and Vesuvius, and how this informed their interpretation of Hannibal. Neither embracing nor passively fearing the destabilizing effeminization of the south, Tourists instead used their encounters with these climates and natural phenomena to further their own aims and agendas. These aims were much less preoccupied with the distant delights of the sublime than has previously been suggested, and rather more concerned with undertaking a set of practices that stemmed from an enduring Grand Tour tradition of hardy physicality in travel. By the time they reached Switzerland and the Alps, many Grand Tourists had already encountered multiple hardships and dangers on the roads, sports fields and battlefields of France, the Low Countries, the German principalities and Austria. Yet in the Alps they not only took the mountain roads, but often deliberately stepped off them and on to the mountains and glaciers themselves. In doing this, Tourists sought an experience of these locations that focused on a physical confrontation with the dangers these structures posed. This act of hardy, rational and controlled physicality was being performed in a climate viewed as emblematic of the ‘north’ and highly conducive to forming healthy, vigorous, and virtuous bodies and masculinities. Moreover, this hardy, strapping ‘northern’ physicality was maintained as Grand Tourists travelled on to the ‘south’ – again by embracing the hardships of Italian roads and, ultimately, by climbing Vesuvius. This was intended as a defiant act of displacement which demonstrated that, unlike Hannibal, elite eighteenth-century men could encounter, resist and overcome the effects of the luxurious south. By enduring and even flourishing in the harsh environs of the mountains, glaciers, and the heat and ash of Vesuvius, these young men sought to prove the fixed nature of their northern British identity.

Grand Tourists’ representations of their engagement with the Alps and Vesuvius bore remarkable similarities. Accounts of both locations focused on the highly physical nature of the encounter and the strenuous exertion required. Grand Tourists claimed that their curiosity and courage impelled them to move ever closer to the heart of the danger, and they emphasized their ability to view these environs and their hazards with a rational, objective eye. In many ways, the Grand Tour’s engagement with natural phenomena was closely associated with the eighteenth-century culture of enlightened scientific exploration and the period’s nascent culture of mountaineering. Exploring the connections between these three cultures reveals how each was bound up with demonstrations of the ubiquitous elite masculine virtues of courage, honour, endurance and self-control in proximity to a series of uniquely challenging landscapes.

Going beyond the sublime

Grand Tourists were au fait with the theory and culture of the sublime, especially as the sublime experiences of the Alps and Vesuvius became an integral aspect of travel culture during the 1760s and 1770s.¹⁸ During these decades, Grand Tourists made confident, enthusiastic use of sublime terminology. Accounts of the ‘wild’, ‘rough’, ‘romantick’, ‘magnificently horrid’, and ‘horribly majestic’ Alpine scenery abounded.¹⁹ Even prior to Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry (1757), there is plentiful evidence that early eighteenth-century travellers were starting to view mountains in this way.²⁰ One of the richest earlier examples of this is Thomas Gray’s 1739 account of the Grande Chartreuse and Mount Cenis, which anticipated Burke’s concept of ‘delightful horror’ by nearly twenty years.²¹ Travelling with Horace Walpole and Henry Seymour Conway, Gray reflected that the road to the Grande Chartreuse offered the ideal sublime encounter as ‘You have Death perpetually before your eyes, only so far removed, as to compose the mind without frightening it’. In contrast, ‘Mont Cenis … carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far; … with too much danger to give one time to reflect upon their beauties’.²²

Gray’s account is unusual for its full engagement with the complexities of the sublime’s aesthetic and philosophic theory. The majority of Tour accounts of natural phenomena throughout the century were far less sophisticated. Whether gazing on the snowy Alps or ashy Vesuvius, Tourists typically focused on what they could see, rather than feel, and gave scant thought to the sublime’s capacity for spiritual and philosophical elevation. Moreover, many of the Tourists examined in this book also rejected Gray’s desire to keep danger and death ‘removed’, and instead sought much closer, physical encounters with nature.

One of the earliest examples of this entirely different engagement with the Alps took place almost concurrently with Walpole and Gray’s experience of delightful horror. In June 1741, the latter’s contemporaries and friends in the Common Room club undertook a six-day expedition to the glaciers of Savoy under the enthusiastic leadership of William Windham. Leaving Geneva on horseback, Windham, Robert Price, Richard Aldworth Neville, Thomas Hamilton, 7th earl of Haddington, his younger brother, George Hamilton Baillie, Windham’s tutor Benjamin Stillingfleet, a former tutor Walter Chetwynd and Richard Pococke – an Anglican clergyman, antiquarian and explorer, recently returned from the Levant – followed the River Arve via the Maule and Cluse to the village of Chamonix. From there, they examined the end of what is now called the Mer de Glace glacier. The following day, they climbed the Montenvers (height: 6,889 feet, 3,444 feet above Chamonix and 492 feet above the ice). Climbing this mountain, which was much higher than the glacier and ran right alongside it, enabled them to scramble down directly onto the ice itself. Begun at noon and completed just before sunset, the expedition took about eight hours. On their return to Geneva, they later spent five hours climbing the Maule.

Early descriptions of this expedition were given in Pococke’s travel diary and a letter from Windham to the French miniaturist, Jacques-Antoine Arlaud.²³ Manuscript copies of Windham’s account were circulated in Geneva, Rouen and Paris. A printed version appeared first in French in the Journal Helvétique in 1743, and then a year later as the anonymous first half of an English pamphlet submitted to the Royal Society as An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy.²⁴ The second part of the pamphlet was written by Peter Martel, a Genevan instrument-maker, who had been inspired to lead a follow-up expedition in 1742 with Étienne Martin, a cutler; Étienne Chevalier, a goldsmith; M. Giraud-Duval, a wholesale grocer; and M. Roze, a botanist. The publication also included maps and illustrations by Martel and another Common Room club member, Robert Price.

In his account of the Common Room’s expedition of June 1741, Windham offered a lacklustre engagement with sublime discourse. Rather than relay ‘the Beauty and Variety of the Situations and Prospects’, he preferred to frame his ‘faithful Relation of the Incidents of the Journey’ in relation to the precedents and discourses of scientific explorations and voyages.²⁵ Windham delighted in emphasizing that the Common Room had advanced deeper into the terrain than ‘all the Travellers, who had been to the Glacieres hitherto, had been satisfied with’.²⁶ The most vivid part of his account documented how this decision to go further resulted in an increasingly dangerous route as they forged on to and up the Montenvers, and then down on to the glacier ice.

Windham’s narrative focused on the physical experience and strain of moving through a hostile terrain which had the ability to wreak ‘terrible Havock’ upon itself and the human body. Its treacherous ever-changing ice chasms, shifting earth, snow and avalanches created an environment that, in the words of Thomas Gray, pressed too much danger upon the individual. A misstep would result in death and it was only after they reached the relative safety of the summit that the view changed from one ‘terrible enough to make most People’s Heads turn’ to one of ‘Pleasure’.²⁹ Instead of reflecting on sublime infinity, Windham paid close attention to the physical and sensory state of the party’s condition by referring to their speed, breathing rates, the sounds of ice cracking, and sensations of clinging, slipping, falling and sliding. He even attempted to recreate this physical experience for his readers through long sentences that, through clause after clause, built arduously like an ascent.³⁰

By the 1760s and 70s, expeditions like the Common Room’s had become much more frequent among Grand Tourists with lengthy perambulations around the Alps now increasingly common. One such example is that of John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield who, prior to crossing Mount Cenis and reflecting on Hannibal’s passing, undertook ‘an expedition amongst the Alps’ in October 1763 with Admiral Byng’s nephew and Lord Palmerston. This involved climbing ‘up a Precipice to a Hermits habitation in the side of a rocky Mountain’.³¹ Similar expeditions followed in the next decade. During a ten-month Alpine tour, between January and November 1776, the ‘Triumvirate’ – George Augustus Herbert, later 11th earl of Pembroke and his tutors, the Revd William Coxe and Captain John Floyd – visited St Gotthard, the glaciers of Grindelwald and Savoy, the Valais and St Maurice. They later, and more unusually, also undertook an ice trek during the Baltic leg of their Tour (autumn/winter 1778–9). In 1778, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke also visited the Grindelwald glaciers and walked the mountains of Glaris.³² In summer 1777, Herbert and Yorke’s contemporary, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 3rd earl of Dartmouth – along with his tutor, David Stevenson – likewise spent four months on a tour riding and walking through the Alps, and wrote detailed letters about this experience. These provided some perfunctory references to the sublime: ‘At length escaped from Mountains, rocks, precipices, cataracts, Snow & clouds, in all of which my ideas as well as my figures have long been lost, I will now try whether I can collect them sufficiently to make out a letter’.³³

This approach was swiftly abandoned in favour of detailing his party’s more adventurous exploits. These descriptions ranged from vividly celebrating their encounter with hardships on the road to Basle (discussed in chapter 3) to relishing the hazardous elements of climbing several glaciers and mountains and dramatically telling his parents, ‘I should have given you some little sketch of mountain dangers in my letter from Constance had I not been afraid that as we had at that time more to undergo it might have allarmed’.³⁴

Lewisham’s and Stevenson’s ‘most considerable expedition’ was climbing ‘the snowy tops of [the Canton of Appenzell’s] highest mountain which with incredible difficulty and danger we have lately visited’.³⁵ This was probably Mount Säntis (8,209 feet), which is the highest peak in north-eastern Switzerland. They undertook the climb with a guide and several unnamed companions. Dealing swiftly with the six- or seven-hour ascent to the summit (‘the highest point of our mountain above the region of snow’) and the view (‘a frightful distance below us’), Lewisham devoted most of his letter to the increasingly hazardous descent. Stumbling on ‘a precipice of snow of near 200 foot … nearly perpendicular’, Lewisham fell and ‘descended with incredible velocity upon my b----’. Fortunately, ‘[A]s the valley underneath was full of snow I was not the least hurt, and the method of conveyance was found so agreeable that my example was almost universally followed’. The party remained cheerful and unharmed, ‘except that our breeches & the parts they cover were a little a la glace’.³⁶ The next stage was less entertaining; ‘a pathless precipice, which the wet grass made so exceedingly slippery that it was dangerous to the last degree; however with great difficulty & by the assistance of both hands and feet we arrived at the channel of a torrent’.³⁷ After an anxious wait while the guide rediscovered the path, they ‘crossed a second precipice of snow like the first with this only difference that if I had slipped here instead of the former precipice, I must inevitably have been dashed to pieces’.³⁸ By referring back to the first precipice, Lewisham emphasized the proximity of death and underscored the need for considerable physical and emotional courage and endurance. Only upon their return to the safety of Appenzell, could they relax and bury ‘all our cares, dangers & fatigues into oblivion’.³⁹

During these expeditions, members of the Common Room, Lewisham and other eighteenth-century Grand Tourists were most likely ‘scrambling’ – a mountaineering term which straddles the gap between hill walking and climbing, and indicates the essential use of hands in the ascent or descent of a rock face or ridge. Scrambling is technically and physically less demanding than advanced rock climbing, yet the absence of ropes means that the danger involved should not be underestimated.⁴⁰ These activities were therefore the forerunners of later nineteenth- and twentieth-century practices of mountaineering, hillwalking and rambling. As one of the earliest documented Grand Tour commentaries on the physical dangers of Alpine climbing, the Common Room expedition of 1741 has often been discussed in light of the history of mountaineering. The expedition’s alleged ‘discovery’ of Chamonix and Mount Blanc has long been cited as having had a profound influence on late eighteenth-century Alpinist pioneers such as Horace-Bénédict de Saussure.⁴¹ More recently, Peter Hansen has dispelled this ‘foundation’ myth by placing their activities within the wider eighteenth-century context of local, state-led and scientific Alpine exploration.⁴² But it is also important to remember that these men were, first and foremost, Grand Tourists, and that their activities therefore need to be assessed within the context of the Tour’s cultures and purposes. Certainly, by the 1770s, accounts like Lewisham’s are notable primarily because they convey a strong sense of just how unremarkable these activities were deemed by eighteenth-century Tourists. They were a matter of great personal pride, but there is no indication that – unlike the near-contemporaneous activities of figures like de Saussure – they were considered pioneering feats worthy of renown. Instead, Lewisham’s narrative strongly indicates that they were taking part in a leisure activity that had its dangers and dramas but was now supported by an early tourist infrastructure.

Irrespective of whether Tourists travelled to Italy through France or via Germany and Austria, their routes meant that the first natural phenomenon they traversed was typically the Alpine range. However, their most challenging physical encounter was often with the southern Italian volcano, Mount Vesuvius. Close to the city of Naples, Vesuvius was the most accessible active volcano in Europe. Its height constantly changes due to eruptions, but it is around 4,000 feet. In the eighteenth century, the practice of climbing Vesuvius was partially eased by a well-oiled touristic infrastructure of carriages, mules, guides, porters and refreshments, and was undertaken by men and women of varying ages. Nevertheless, it remained one of the most physically strenuous activities performed by travellers while in Italy.⁴³ Even the most active Grand Tourists confessed it to be a challenge. William Bentinck, 1st Count Bentinck, an enthusiastically energetic huntsman, described the ascent as the ‘hardest work I ever did in my life’ when he climbed Vesuvius in April 1727.⁴⁴ Herbert was so hungry after he returned from his climb in August 1779, that he immediately sat down to an excellent dinner with Lady Hamilton before going home to ‘clean myself ’.⁴⁵ For some, the physical challenges were too great or unappealing. Unsurprisingly, given their reactions to the Alps, Walpole and Gray were content to remain at a distance when visiting Naples in 1740.⁴⁶ In 1771, Philip Francis ‘climbed up a little of it with great Fatigue, but soon gave it up’.⁴⁷

Naples hosted an international range of residential and visiting artists who were also fascinated by the volcano. Seven of these are featured throughout this chapter. Two, Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97) and John ‘Warwick’ Smith (1749–1831), visited Naples and Vesuvius as part of their artistic training. Wright travelled to Italy in 1773–5 as an established artist. His numerous, highly popular depictions of Vesuvius explored the themes of light, the sublime and landscape on a grand scale.⁴⁸ Smith, meanwhile, was a talented watercolourist under the patronage of George Greville, 2nd earl of Warwick. He climbed and sketched Vesuvius numerous times during his Italian training between 1776 and 1781.⁴⁹ Other artists were established members of the Neapolitan international community. The French landscape painter, Pierre-Jacques Volaire (1729–c. 1792), for example, was based in Naples from the 1760s onwards. His prolific depictions of Vesuvius featured an ‘exuberantly dramatic reportage’ style that derived from on-the-spot sketches and frequently featured Tourists themselves.⁵⁰ Volaire’s work was collected by a prestigious, international group of residents and visitors as popular mementos of their climbs.⁵¹ The Irish artist, Henry Tresham (1751–1814), was another who travelled to Italy in 1775 with the ambition of becoming a history painter. He found more success as an agent and dealer but nevertheless produced several watercolours of tourists and guides attaining the volcano’s summit.⁵²

Figure 4.1. Joseph Wright of Derby, ‘Vesuvius from Portici’ (97.29, c.1774–6).

Courtesy of the Huntington Library, Art Collections and Botanical Gardens, San Marino, California. Purchased with funds from the Frances Crandall Dyke Bequest.

Figure 4.2. Michael Wutky, ‘Eruption of Vesuvius, seen across the Gulf of Naples’ (GG-742, c.1790/1800).

By permission of Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien/The Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Figure 4.3. Pierre-Jacques Volaire, ‘An Eruption of Vesuvius by Moonlight’ (CVCSC:0259.S, 1774).

By permission of Compton Verney, Warwickshire, UK and Bridgeman Images.

Figure 4.4. Pierre-Jacques Volaire, ‘Vesuvius Erupting at Night’ (CVCSC:0343.S, 1771).

By permission of Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

Figure 4.5. Jakob Philipp Hackert, ‘An Eruption of Vesuvius in 1774,’ (Neg. Nr. M10111, c.1774–5).

By permission of Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

Figure 4.6. Detail of Jakob Philipp Hackert, ‘An Eruption of Vesuvius in 1774’ (Neg. Nr. M10111, c. 1774–5).

By permission of Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel, Gemäldegalerie Alte Meister.

Figure 4.7. Michael Wutky, ‘The Summit of Vesuvius Erupting’ (GG-390, c. 1790/1800).

By permission of Gemäldegalerie der Akademie der bildenden Künste Wien/The Paintings Gallery of the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna.

Figure 4.8. John ‘Warwick’ Smith, ‘from Album of Views in Italy, [24] Crater [of Vesuvius]’ (T05846, 1778).

By permission of Tate Images. ©Tate, London 2019.

Figure 4.9. Henry Tresham, ‘The Ascent of Vesuvius, 1785–91’ (B1977.14.6296, 1785–91).

Yale Centre for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

Figure 4.10. Pietro Fabris, ‘Interior view of Crater of Mount Vesuvius … plate IX’, from William Hamilton, Campi Phlegraei (Naples, 1776).

By permission of University of Glasgow Library, Special Collections.

Wright, Volaire, Smith and Tresham were, at times, ruefully conscious of their superficial knowledge of volcanology.⁵³ In contrast, other artists – including Pietro Fabris, Jakob Philipp Hackert (1737–1807) and Michael Wutky (1739–c. 1823) – were celebrated for their scientific accuracy. Fabris was probably Italian-born and lived in Naples from 1754 to 1804. His work was popular among the expatriate community (he was commissioned to produce Fortrose’s ‘At home in Naples’ scenes discussed in chapter 3) and he collaborated closely with Sir William Hamilton, the British envoy-extraordinary to the Spanish court in Naples and a renowned volcanologist. In their most substantial collaboration, Fabris produced fifty-four geologically accurate gouache drawings for Hamilton’s Campi Phlegraei: Observations on the Volcanoes of the Two Sicilies (1776).⁵⁴ Hackert, a German court painter to King Ferdinand of Naples, and Wutky, an Austrian painter, also worked closely with Hamilton. Their geological studies of volcanoes in action often showed realistic groups of observers starkly outlined against an awesome natural spectacle.⁵⁵

These depictions of Vesuvius and the frail bodies of its human observers were popular among the elite community. Alongside describing their encounters with the volcano in letters and diaries, they often commemorated them by commissioning, purchasing and displaying this artwork. Remarkable similarities are revealed when comparing such artwork with descriptions by Grand Tourists and their tutors of the ascent of Vesuvius. Both visual and textual accounts from across the century emphasized the volcano’s perilous might and the ever-present threat to the human observer, no matter where they stood. They also paid close attention to the overwhelming physical and sensory nature of the climb while stressing that the ideal response to the volcano was that of the elite man who calmly observed and pressed nearer to the spectacle and danger.

Artistic depictions of Vesuvius used five distinct viewpoints which moved ever closer to the heart of the volcano. The first was a sublime, long-distance view of a violent, large-scale eruption, in which a barrier of vineyards, fields or the bay of Naples offered a sense of distance and tenuous safety (see Figures 4.1–4.2). The second viewpoint moved on to Vesuvius’s lower slopes. Situated some eight miles from Naples, this was the threshold where visitors left their carriages to inspect the lower lava flows and to watch small-scale eruptions. Volaire, in particular, produced numerous iterations of this viewpoint (see front cover image and Figure 4.3). Set at night and showing Tourists watching the eruptions, these created a sense of hazard, heat and drama by contrasting livid red fire and lava, charcoal ash and steam, and dark night skies. A third viewpoint, also often shown at night, was of the ascent between the base and summit. Hackert (Figures 4.5–4.6) and Wutky (Figure 4.7), for example, produced dramatic images of spectators and guides on foot midway up Vesuvius during the 1774 eruption. The fourth viewpoint showed Tourists and guides attaining the summit and on the very edge of the crater (see Figures 4.8–4.9). Finally, in the fifth view, Fabris (Figure 4.10) used a suspended viewpoint to show Tourists inside the crater, examining its distinct features. The fourth and fifth views depict Vesuvius in a calmer, daylight state. Even so, representations of yellow sulphur, steam and an often-active cone erupting with hot rocks hinted at the mountain’s ever-present potential for violence.

Written accounts also partitioned encounters with Vesuvius into a series of zones that became progressively more challenging. Many Grand Tourists and tutors were thrilled by their first sight of Vesuvius, but found it unfulfilling to remain at a distance. In 1732, Joseph Spence, during his first Grand Tour as tutor to Charles Sackville, Lord Middlesex, later 2nd duke of Dorset, described how he had ‘a most distinct view of Vesuvius’ from his roof, but that ‘It was with a great deal of impatience that I waited for the morning when we were to go up’.⁵⁶ Spence went on to describe how the ‘rising and badness of the way’ forced a transition from carriage to mules to walking to scrambling. The final stage was ‘infinitely the worst’ as ‘the way is so steep and bad that you are forced to quit even then and be dragged up the two last miles by men who make a trade of it ... Two of these honest men get just before you, with strong girdles on; you take hold of the girdles, and then they draw, and you climb up as fast as you can’.⁵⁷

Descriptions of these physical sensations and the climb’s difficulties remained unchanged cross the century. In the words of William Bentinck in 1727, the climbers encountered ‘the quantity of cinders and hot ashes, which make one fall back again about three quarters of each step one takes’.⁵⁸ Spence admitted that this exhausting terrain forced the climbers and their assistants to ‘rest very often’.⁵⁹ Despite this, the punishing environment meant that ‘one must do the rest all out of breath, because the fire that is under one’s feet hinders you from standing still an instant in the same place’.⁶⁰ In 1773, George Finch, 9th earl of Winchilsea found the sulphurous emissions and smoke to be the ‘worst part of going up’ as ‘if you happen to breath any of it which you cannot avoid, it is really suffocating’.⁶¹ Vesuvius, then, was a spectacle to be experienced with the whole body: upon attaining the summit, Tourists felt the ‘Earth tremble at every eruption of the stones’, heard the ‘tremendous’ noise of the explosion, and saw liquid rocks flying and hardening.⁶² This intense physical, sensory experience was depicted in Volaire’s, Wutky’s and Hackert’s evocative representations of steam, smoke and the glowing lava reds reflecting off bodies bent double with effort (front cover and Figures 4.3–4.7), and in the labouring figures toiling their way up to the summit in Smith’s and Tresham’s work (Figures 4.8–4.9). Any Tourist who had undertaken this climb would surely have viewed these pieces as excellent visual reminders of their arduous ascent.

Figure 4.11. John Shackleton or James Dagnia, ‘William Windham II (1717–61) in the uniform of a Hussar’ (NT 1401251, Felbrigg, Norfolk, 1742–67).

By permission of the National Trust.

The human body was central to these textual and visual accounts. The spectacle, drama and scale of the volcano was either relayed through written descriptions of an author’s bodily and sensory reactions, or depicted in the image of frail human figures silhouetted against the glowing lava or the summit’s skyline. Both media also offered a bold statement on the body’s immediacy to danger, and the elite male response to this proximity. The artworks depict three bodily reactions to the peril of Vesuvius. The first was to flee in terror and superstitiously beg the intervention of Januarius, the patron saint of Naples (see, for example, Volaire’s Eruption of Vesuvius from the Ponte della Maddalena, 1782). Closely associated with uneducated Neapolitans, this response was deemed unacceptable by northern elite men. The second response was to stand one’s ground and gaze upon the dangerous spectacle with a poised calmness, curiosity and delight. Volaire, Wutky, Hackert and Fabris repeatedly associated this reaction with contemporary elite men (Figures 4.2–4.10 and front cover). Whether watching a large-scale eruption from across the bay, at the very edge of a lava flow, or inside the crater itself, these fashionably-dressed figures stood, sat, gestured and reclined with easy elegance.⁶³

The third reaction was to move even closer. This shifted the elite man from the role of willing spectator to someone prepared to confront the dangers before them. In Vesuvius Erupting at Night (1771, Figure 4.4), Volaire populates Vesuvius’s steep flanks with three sets of climbers. One foolhardy group perch on a tree hanging perilously close to the lava. The most adventurous are situated even higher on a distant ridge. In An Eruption of Vesuvius in 1774 (Figure 4.5), Hackert includes a party climbing a steep rockface to examine the source of an active secondary vent; three have made it, and pose casually silhouetted against the flowing lava. Immediately below them, two further figures are frozen mid-climb, clinging to the rockface just next to the falling lava (see Figure 4.6 for details). Written narratives nearly always depicted Grand Tourists performing this third reaction: climbing up the volcano and striving, as far as possible, to reach the source and summit of the danger. Such accounts typically emphasized the fact that they and their guides persevered until the danger became impassable. Herbert noted that his failure to attain the summit in 1779 was due to a ‘mixture of smoke and cloud’ which meant that members of the party could no longer breathe.⁶⁴ On a clear run, Grand Tourists described how they would even climb onto the ‘principal chimney’ inside the crater. There, they were only halted by the impossibility of entering into the volcano itself.

Despite the fact that one expedition took place amidst fire and ash, and the other in snow and ice, the practices and narrative conventions surrounding Vesuvius and the Alpine mountains and glaciers bore a remarkable similarity. Both were steep, hazardous terrains that were ‘off the beaten track’ and appreciated as natural phenomena worthy of Grand Tourists’ time and attention. Both were also explored through primarily physical encounters that required strength, exertion and an unflinching response to danger. Rather than retreating, Grand Tourists consistently sought to depict themselves as courageously and curiously pressing forward until the danger became impassable before pausing to calmly survey the spectacle before them.

Men of science or men of courage?

Vesuvius and the Alps were highly unpredictable environments. Mountain paths could be lost, avalanches occurred without warning, glacial ice chasms moved, and the timing and extent of Vesuvius’s next eruption remained, in popular opinion, unknowable. By doing more than simply travelling through the Alps or viewing Vesuvius from afar, Grand Tourists were acting within the context of the hardy and martial elite culture of honourably confronting danger. This suggests that they saw mountains, glaciers and volcanoes as being imbued with the same transformative dangers as the battlefield, sportsfield and the hard road. These were locations where elite men could undertake a performative confrontation with danger. This in turn had value in terms of their social and masculine standing and the development of emulative male virtues.

In Grand Tour accounts of the Alps, these connections were made visible from the outset. The Common Room’s private and published accounts of their Chamonix climb in summer 1741 readily treated their Alpine activities as a natural extension of their homosocial, sporting and martial conduct. These ‘exceedingly cheerful’ adventures were marked by laughter, conviviality and practical jokes. Richard Pococke, for example, surprised the party by dressing up in Arabic dress, procured during his recent travels to the Middle East.⁶⁵ As a far more experienced traveller, Pococke viewed the expedition as a ‘diversion in such good company’ after his ‘long travels & fatigues’.⁶⁶ At the top of the Chamonix glacier, club members crowned their achievement by participating in other typical elite homosocial activities: a hunt and a toast to ‘Admiral Vernon’s Health, and Success to British Arms [sic]’.⁶⁷ The toast was either to the famous admiral’s recent victory at Porto Bello (1739) or a premature celebration of Vernon’s conduct at Cartagena (1741), a battle which he was initially rumoured to have won. Through this act of ceremony, the Common Room demonstrated their pride in Britain’s naval prowess and growing empire and yoked their achievement of climbing the glacier to a victory in arms.

William Windham’s account of the Common Room’s expedition also placed great emphasis on celebrating the group’s feats of physical skill and endurance. These, he claimed, astonished their guides who had been ‘so much persuaded that we should never be able to go through with our Talk’ that they made additional preparation ‘in case we should be overcome with Fatigue’.⁶⁸ In outlining the group’s refusal to be put off by warnings of danger and their level-headed calm on the precipice and ice cracks, Windham paired this physical performance with the same internal masculine virtues of ‘strength’, courage, endurance and ‘resolution’ that were repeatedly linked to war.⁶⁹

Windham and the Common Room’s Alpine encounter took place in 1741, two years prior to George Townshend, 1st Marquis Townshend’s decision to volunteer in 1743 during his Grand Tour. The latter was a close family friend and Norfolk neighbour of Windham, who may himself have also volunteered with the Austrian or Prussian army sometime after 1741 (see chapter 2 for details). Windham, as was shown at the end of chapter 3, then returned home to a few wasted decades before becoming heavily involved with the New Militia movement. This involvement came about through Townsend, who was the architect of the New Militia Bill (1757). Following Townshend’s appointment as colonel of the Norfolk Militia, Windham served as his deputy and subsequently produced a manual for training militia troops, Plan of Discipline, Composed for the Use of the Militia of the County of Norfolk (1759).⁷⁰

Although Windham and Townsend could not have anticipated their future involvement in the militia movement, their Tour writings from the 1730s and 1740s made clear that both believed elite men had a natural aptitude for military affairs and that the sports and physical pursuits undertaken during a Grand Tour would be useful in preparing themselves, and others, for military leadership. Townshend, for example, was convinced that his Grand Tour experience of volunteering had prepared him to raise his own regiment on his return to England. Others likewise saw Windham’s experience as readying him for militia service from the 1750s. In the words of Richard Aldworth Neville, his fellow club member, Windham – having been ‘peculiarly attentive to the system established in the Prussian army, at that time the School of Europe during his Grand Tour’ – later ‘applied the knowledge he had thus acquired to the advantage of his country’ when writing his Plan of Discipline.⁷¹ Windham himself believed his Alpine activities had played an important part, as is evident from his commemorative Grand Tour portrait, commissioned after his return from Europe in about 1742. Here the military and Alpine elements of his Tour met. The portrait depicted Windham in the uniform of an Austrian Hussar, holding an ice pick and with a looming craggy rock formation in the background (see Figure 4.11).

In his 1759 Plan for the militia, Windham stressed the importance of organic movement, unity, discipline and self-control instilled through the instruction of officers and via drill work.⁷² This use of military terminology and an emphasis on discipline had been anticipated in his 1744 pamphlet on the Common Room’s Alpine expedition.⁷³ Here, he described the club as a ‘Company’ that travelled ‘well armed’ and who were prepared to get themselves ‘out of a Scrape’.⁷⁴ Furthermore, the ascent of the glacier was described as a test of discipline which had only been made possible by enforced ‘Rules’: ‘[That] no one should go out of his Rank; That he who led the way should go a slow and even Pace; That whoever found himself fatigued, or out of Breath, might call for a Halt’ and water should be taken regularly. These criteria prevented ‘those among us who were the most in wind, from fatiguing the rest, by pushing on too fast’.⁷⁵ ‘In wind’ was a phrase often used in military and boxing circles, and referred to men who were ready or fit for action.⁷⁶ The Common Room were, Windham claimed, displaying leadership qualities by combining rational intelligence, discipline and teamwork alongside a physical capacity to embrace a difficult natural environment. The physical challenges posed by the Alpine terrain therefore offered, in the opinion of Windham and later Grand Tourists, an ideal opportunity to test, demonstrate and depict their identity as elite men of courage and as future military leaders.

At the same time, Tourists’ encounters with Alpine and Neapolitan landscapes were not just opportunities to test fearlessness and physicality. They were also motivated by their desire to promote themselves as enlightened men of science. Eighteenth-century Enlightenment thinkers approached the world as an exhibition to be explored and ordered.⁷⁷ Marshalled by organizations emerging from the seventeenth-century scientific revolution – of which the Royal Society was the leading British example – travellers, explorers and natural historians contributed to the collection of knowledge through detailed reports, measurements and observations.⁷⁸ Demonstrating a curiosity about the ‘overall map of knowledge’ was an important element of elite masculinity for those aspiring to become fashionable and cultured gentlemen.⁷⁹ The Grand Tour provided a series of opportunities to do this. Tourists examined cabinets of curiosity, visited industries like the Hungarian salt, silver and gold mines, and engaged with Europe’s scientific communities through conversation and attendance at lectures and experiments.

Grasping the chance to demonstrate their enlightened curiosity through direct observation of natural phenomena was an important part of this performance. Nowhere was more suited to this task than the environment of Naples. The ‘natural productions’ of this region could even, it was admitted by the art dealer, J. C. Hippisley, outweigh ‘the Wonders of Art in Antient & Modern Rome’.⁸⁰ During their stay in Naples, Tourists visited the Phlegraean Fields and carried out various ‘experiments’; testing the heat of the earth with their swords, boiling eggs in sulphurous water and witnessing the infamous grotto del cane experiment, where a dog was suffocated by the cave’s toxic air and then revived.⁸¹ Their accounts of Vesuvius in particular often mimicked the style and tone of Royal Society reports in an effort to demonstrate a capacity for precise observation. For example, in August 1779, Herbert joined the diplomat and volcanologist, Sir William Hamilton, on a trip to the volcano. Herbert’s letters to William Coxe later relayed a series of precise measurements, including of a stone thrown up during a recent major eruption that was ‘108 English feet round and 17 high’.⁸² Herbert also detailed Hamilton’s discovery of vitrification, a process by which the heated rock liquifies, leaks from the solid rock and then gradually transforms into ‘the common pummy stone’.⁸³ Tourists were keen to demonstrate their knowledge of leading volcanological theories. Holroyd and Winchilsea drew on the work of natural philosophers including Thomas Burnet, William Whiston, and Athanasius Kircher to argue that the two volcanoes, Vesuvius and Solfatara, were connected by underground hollows.⁸⁴

William Windham and the Common Room club were similarly eager to present themselves as gentlemen and patrons of science. As J. S. Rowlinson has observed, Windham used his 1744 pamphlet, An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps of the Savoy, to secure his election to the Royal Society. Windham was proposed as a potential member in October 1743, the pamphlet was offered as evidence of his suitability in January 1744, and he was elected a Fellow that same month. The pamphlet was also an attempt to establish himself as a patron of his co-author Peter Martel, who came to London in 1743 in the hope of establishing himself as a maker of scientific instruments.⁸⁵ Windham’s ambitions fitted in with his and the group’s overall interests and abilities. At least two of the tutors were talented men of science. John Williamson, tutor to the earl of Haddington, was a renowned mathematician whose work was praised by the University of Oxford’s Savilian professor of astronomy, James Bradley. In Geneva, Williamson was an established member of the ‘Beaux Esprits’, a weekly meeting of Geneva’s leading mathematicians.⁸⁶ In 1749, he was elected to the Royal Society with the backing of influential figures such as the Society’s president, Sir Martin Folkes, and the mathematician, Benjamin Robins.⁸⁷ Windham’s tutor, Benjamin Stillingfleet, also excelled in mathematics and later became famous for his contributions to botany.⁸⁸ Windham himself had displayed a considerable aptitude for mathematics and science-based subjects since childhood.⁸⁹ His Grand Tour notebooks and letters regularly contained mathematical formula, lists of instruments and notes on other scientific expeditions. While in Paris in 1738, he attended lectures at the French Academy of Sciences on the 1736 Lapland expedition undertaken by the Swedish physicist, Anders Celsius, and French mathematician, Pierre Maupertuis.⁹⁰ His pamphlet also quoted several important publications on Alpine exploration, including J. J. Scheuchzer’s influential Inter Alpinum (1723) and Abraham Ruchat’s Les Délices de la Suisse (1714). His desire to be considered a man of science and exploration is evident in his repeated use of the term ‘curiosity’ throughout his pamphlet. In a document of twelve pages, Windham used the term eight times and often invoked it at each decision point for turning back or moving forward.⁹¹ ‘Curiosity’, with all its connotations with natural philosophy, exploration and travel, was being deliberately identified as a key motivation for the Common Room’s glacier expedition in a bid to highlight their scientific ambitions.⁹²

There was, however, a clear tension between this well-intentioned ambition and Windham’s actual willingness to undertake the arduous processes of observation and recording. In truth, the 1744 publication’s real scientific value lay in Martel’s report on the 1742 expedition. This had been undertaken by a well-equipped team with specialisms in botany, mineralogy and chemistry, and resulted in an account rich in precise measurements and detailed observations of temperature, glacier structure, mineralogy and flora. In contrast, Windham’s study reveals that he and the rest of the Common Room were distinctly uninterested in the scientific exactness that was the hallmark of leading natural philosophers and explorers. On discovering that their best mathematician, John Williamson, had decided not to attend, they ‘chose not to take the Trouble of carrying’ any of their mathematical instruments – despite the fact that Windham and Stillingfleet were both capable of using them.⁹³ Windham even confessed to having forgotten to take a compass. Without equipment, it was ‘impossible for the Eye to judge exactly’, a circumstance that restricted Windham’s report to vague estimates.⁹⁴

Such reluctance probably stemmed from a gentlemanly desire to rise above excessive attention to detail. As such, Windham and the Common Room were more interested in asserting their credentials as enlightened men of science through other means. Barbara Moira Stafford argued that eighteenth-century scientific travellers used a language of action that replicated the bodily experience of immediacy by detailing the sensory, physiological and physical hardships of travel. This deliberate strategy was used to establish their authority and inquisitive role within the physical world.⁹⁵ As already discussed, Windham’s account used these very same tactics by prioritizing the sensory and physical challenges of the ascent. This was overtly linked to presenting Common Room members as pioneering explorers who created new opportunities for others. Windham asserted that ‘All the Merit we can pretend to is having opened the way to others who may have the Curiosity of the same kind’. He sought to give the expedition further colour by claiming their party had ‘the Air of a Caravan’ and that they encountered the primitive superstitions of ‘Ignorant’ locals who believed that witches played on the ice. While ‘the terrible Description People had given us of the Country was much exaggerated’, Windham nonetheless emphasized that his party’s scientific curiosity resulted in supposedly necessary acts of privation, such as camping in a meadow or killing and dressing a sheep ‘upon the Spot’.⁹⁶

Windham’s attraction to the rougher, hardier, more adventurous elements of exploration is evident in his detailed description of the Maupertuis Lapland expedition of 1736. Here he gave considerable space to outlining the stubborn persistence that allowed Swedish and French explorers to endure numerous ‘terrible’ dangers and discomforts to achieve their research aims.⁹⁷ Windham was not alone in this fixation. As Stafford noted, the wider eighteenth-century scientific community celebrated a masculine mindset that required an active life and willingness to face constant risk. Exploration narratives made frequent reference to a discomfort, danger and terror that, while ‘severely felt and highly disagreeable’, was integral to the pursuit of scientific goals. In their combination of physicality with a commitment to truth and sense of purpose, elite men of science, Stafford argued, drew on wider formulations of masculinity rooted in the figures of Odysseus and the questing chivalric knight.⁹⁸ The performance and identity of the enlightened man of science was therefore inherently connected to the martial, hardy masculinities celebrated by Tourists elsewhere in their other experiences of physical discomfort and danger.

This connection was evident in how the scientific community regarded Sir William Hamilton (1730–1806), who served as envoy-extraordinary to the Spanish court in Naples from 1764 to 1799, and was a well-known figure to Grand Tourists visiting Naples from the mid 1760s. In later life, Hamilton was regularly lampooned in the press for his obsessive collecting and his role as the elderly cuckold in the affair between his second wife, Emma, and Vice-Admiral Nelson. Yet in his earlier career, Sir William was regarded as an active and able diplomat who had previously served in the military, an excellent host, a tasteful collector, a skilled hunter and marksman, and an international authority in volcanology and the natural sciences.⁹⁹ He was, in many ways, regarded as a figure who embodied the fusing of elite gentlemanliness and scientific enquiry.

Hamilton’s intellectual reputation was secured by his accounts of the eruption of Vesuvius in September 1765 and October 1767. These were widely circulated and led to his rapid election to the Royal Society.¹⁰⁰ The reports documented a commitment to detailed empirical observation, but also described the dangers he underwent to achieve such observations on the slopes of Vesuvius.¹⁰¹ This included one narrow escape in October 1767:

Hamilton’s account contained many of the traits present in Grand Tourists’ narratives of Vesuvius and the Alps, but dramatically escalated. His observations used all of his senses: he saw the eruption, was blinded by ash, was deafened by the noise, smelt the sulphur, and felt the earth tremble and the pumice-stones sting his skin. His survival involved the strenuous, sustained physical activity of running for three miles, and the ability to assess the situation while in pain and under pressure. This, therefore, was a description which showcased his manly courage, coolheadedness, physicality and endurance.

Hamilton’s bravery and fortitude was widely celebrated. John Stuart, Lord Mount Stuart envied his passing a night on Vesuvius and considered his Royal Society election richly deserved ‘for the pains you have been at’.¹⁰³ The lord chancellor, Charles Yorke – father of Philip and himself a Society fellow – wrote of how the physician Samuel Simmons was similarly ‘full of admiration at your [Hamilton’s] philosophic fortitude in the midst of the Horrors of Vesuvius. I told him, with what tranquillity you had expresst [sic] your hope to me, that another concussion would lay the mountain open to the observation of the curious. We could not help fearing that you would suffer the fate of Pliny’.¹⁰⁴

This comparison with Pliny the Elder, who was killed while observing Vesuvius during the 79 AD eruption, was also made by French volcanists, who called Hamilton ‘Le Pline moderne du Vesuve’.¹⁰⁵ John Thackery suggested that this comparison gestured to Hamilton’s entwined interests of Vesuvius and classical antiquity while also warning him not to take his fascination too far.¹⁰⁶ However, the comparison was also an admiring acknowledgement of Sir William’s unflinching commitment to examining a potentially deadly phenomenon. Hamilton’s ability to maintain calm and detailed observations while under immense pressure and danger was therefore important to his international reputation as a gentleman and man of science.

Perhaps because of the exploits of men like Hamilton and the celebrated naturalist Joseph Banks, whose Endeavour voyage was completed in 1771, Grand Tourists’ admiration for and selective association with the more adventurous qualities of Enlightened men of science strengthened in the late eighteenth century. Yet, in the Alps, these comparisons appeared to be increasingly divorced from any scientific contexts. In 1777, part way through their Alpine tour, David Stevenson reported to his student’s father, William, 2nd earl of Dartmouth:

Stevenson’s comparison of Lewisham with Sir Joseph Banks made no reference to the latter’s scientific discoveries; nor does Stevenson indicate that Lewisham might aspire to become a leading natural philosopher. While Stevenson’s and Lewisham’s descriptions of their ‘expeditions’ used typical tropes of exploration – such as the lost, panicked guide, and the primitive behaviours of the ‘inhabitants of the mountain’ – they made no reference to any scientific observations. Rather, the comparison with Banks and these references took place solely within the context of a pleasurable adventure that was ‘diverting’, ‘most amusing’ and had contributed to the formation of an elite man who was resilient, unflinching and courageous in the face of danger, rather than an observant man of science.¹⁰⁸

Demonstrating such qualities in word and deed was important, not least because men like Hamilton openly looked for these virtues in the men they met. In September 1778, about a year after Lewisham’s and Stevenson’s ‘vagabond’ adventures, Hamilton wrote to Joseph Banks: ‘I long’d for you, [Daniel] Solander & Charles Greville, for tho’ I have some company with me on these expeditions [up Vesuvius] sometimes, yet they have in general so much fear & so little Curiosity that I have rather be alone’.¹⁰⁹

Hamilton’s frustration and longing for men of equal curiosity and courage had been provoked by the poor conduct of the Neapolitan Duke Calabritto, Don Francesco, who had gone to view Vesuvius’s lava flows with his wife and another man described as an engineer. When ‘the lava set fire to some juniper bushes & made a sudden blaze’, wrote Sir William, ‘the Duke thought a new Eruption. He ran away crying out to the Engineer, per l’amor di Dio avete cura della mia cara Duchessa [for God’s sake you take care of my dear Duchess], & never stopped till he got to his Coach’.¹¹⁰ Hamilton found the duke’s nervous cowardice, relayed to him by the duchess herself, amusing, but he was also infuriated by the duke’s ignorance. Without courage and composure, Hamilton reasoned, the duke – and elite men more generally – would never learn whether or not they were safe in the face of natural phenomena.

Hamilton’s strictures on admirable and less acceptable male conduct were also intended for the numerous elite Grand Tourists who passed through Naples. As part of his responsibilities as British ambassador, Sir William played an important and influential role of host, mentor and assessor for these young men, while also casting a critical eye over their appearances and performances. He and other ambassadors dispensed advice, wisdom and wrote reports on their progress to parents and other interested parties.¹¹¹ One such report was written by Hamilton to Lewisham’s father in February 1778, seven months before his complaint to Banks. On this occasion Sir William chose to ‘defer telling you exactly what I think of Ld Lewisham till I have seen more of him but as yet I cannot find the least fault in him except that his outside is a little too fat’. Hamilton’s plans for Lewisham included directing him on ‘a tour of the Curious spots in this Country rich with monuments of antiquity, and great operations of nature both of which he seems to have a great taste for’.¹¹² As Hamilton frequently accompanied Grand Tourists up Vesuvius himself, this was evidently an opportunity to assess their qualities as men. Grand Tourists were keenly aware that Hamilton was an arbiter of what made a successful masculine performance and would have paid close attention to what he said, did and expected with regard to the dangers of Vesuvius.

The allure of presenting themselves as men of courage and action was appealing to young Grand Tourists. Writing in the 1740s, Windham prominently associated the virtues of courage and endurance with Richard Pococke who, having travelled extensively around Europe and the Middle East, was ‘far from fearing Hardship’. Having long had a ‘great Desire to make this Excursion’, Windham had previously been deterred by ‘the Difficulty in getting Company’. When Pococke arrived in Geneva, Windham was delighted to have finally found a man of ‘like Inclination’.¹¹³ In this, Windham was hinting that physical and mental strength, endurance and fearlessness were equal, if not superior, to one’s intellectual ability. This reasoning underpinned his comments on the failure of the tutor and mathematician, John Williamson, to attend the expedition. Windham singled Williamson out as the most intelligent and therefore potentially the most valuable member of a scientific expedition. Yet Williamson was so afraid of physical ‘fatigue’ that he failed to take part. Windham blamed the expedition’s failure to carry out more detailed measurements on Williamson’s lack of physical strength and mental resolution.¹¹⁴ This, of course, was a hypocritical judgement that ignored Windham’s own culpability. However, these comments carried the clear implication that without the requisite physical and mental strength, Williamson’s intellectual ability was of only limited use.

In describing their engagements with the Alps and Vesuvius, Grand Tourists across the eighteenth century took the opportunity to present themselves as hardy adventurers, and to claim a reputation for military readiness, enlightened knowledge and even a certain glamour. Yet these actions and accounts were also about demonstrating more than this – serving as proof of an enduring ability to maintain a physical capacity for hardiness, vigour and health that was perceived as inherently British, and to resist the most dangerous aspects of foreign influence.

Besting Hannibal: fixing identities on the Grand Tour

Despite the many similarities in why and how Grand Tourists engaged with the Alps and Vesuvius, these remained two extremely different environments and climates. Tourists and their families accorded particular significance to the distinctiveness of these sites, drawing on wider beliefs that climate and environment shaped individual and national human characteristics, such as health, temperament, morality, identity and physical appearance.¹¹⁵ Central to eighteenth-century climate theory was the belief, inherited and adapted from classical thought, that the world was composed of three distinct environmental systems: the ‘temperate zone’ which produced the most admirable people and forms of government; the ‘torrid south’ which gave rise to enfeebled bodies, increased sexual desire and intellectual creativity – typically resulting in indolent people and tyrannical governments; and the ‘frigid north’ which resulted in strong bodies, fierce spirits, and dull minds.¹¹⁶

Easily shaped by prejudice, climate theory was readily adaptable to evolving political circumstances. Thus, by the seventeenth and eighteenth century, the boundaries of these zones had moved to reflect a shift in political power from the Mediterranean to northern Europe. Some interpretations argued that the temperate zone had shifted to include the British Isles.¹¹⁷ For others, Britain remained in the northern zone, but the negative traits associated with a frigid climate were overlooked in favour of focusing on the positive qualities of industriousness, strong bodies, steady natures and fierce independent spirits.¹¹⁸ Similar associations were made with Alpine countries, particularly Switzerland, which was admired for its republican government.

By contrast Italy and southern Europe were seen as either a peripheral beneficiary of the temperate climate or a region that had slipped into the torrid zone. Southern Mediterranean societies were increasingly linked with passion, sexual desire and tyranny.¹¹⁹ For example, eighteenth-century commentators saw Rome’s poisonous air and the Roman Campagna’s malaria infestation as a metaphor for rottenness in the midst of pleasure. Rome’s unhealthy climate was held responsible for its reputation as a cradle of artistic and political genius, for the decline of the Roman empire and for the tyranny of the Catholic Church.¹²⁰ Likewise, Sweet observed that Naples’s ‘peculiar balance of menace and attraction’ was firmly linked to its climate and surroundings.¹²¹ Its menace lay in Neapolitans’ reputation for crime, a fanatical devotion to Catholicism and hysteria, and was closely entwined with the looming, unpredictable Vesuvius.¹²² Naples’s reputation for pleasure came from the region’s mild climate and the remarkably fertile soil. With little need to labour, the populace had gained an ancient reputation for otium (lazy indolence), which was blamed for the city’s repeated submission to conquest.¹²³

Climate theory sought to explain the perceived differences between men, cultures and political systems across the world. But proponents also argued that individuals who moved from one climate zone to another were subject to substantial change. Alongside a medical belief in an environment’s power to preserve or destroy health, transitions in climate were thought to alter temperament, identity and even skin colour. Thus, it was posited that within ten generations the descendants of a white man from a northern climate would become black by living in a ‘torrid zone’, and vice versa.¹²⁴ These beliefs featured prominently in eighteenth-century travel writings. Accounts of Naples, for example, often highlighted how the intoxicating, luxurious climate affected the mind and body.¹²⁵ James Boswell, who visited Naples in March 1765, claimed that ‘a man’s mind never failed to catch the spirit of the climate in which he breathes’. Giving full rein to his libertine inclinations, he wrote that ‘My blood was inflamed by the burning climate, and my passions were violent. I indulged in them; my mind had almost nothing to do with it’.¹²⁶ Writing in 1787, the German writer and statesman, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, exclaimed ‘Naples is a paradise, and everyone lives, as it were, in a state of intoxicated self-forgetfulness. It is the same with me. I hardly recognize myself. I feel like a completely different person’.¹²⁷

The danger that Grand Tourists might irreversibly become completely different people during their travels by succumbing to the allure of the foreign was a matter of well-publicized concern. Yet, given that young elite Grand Tourists were sent abroad to consolidate identities that were specifically adult, male, British and socially superior, it will not be surprising to find that elite culture actively sought to mitigate the negative effects of young men’s movement across climate zones. As with their response to hazards posed by travel and health, aristocratic families sought to implement a series of measures designed to protect their sons and to use potential dangers as opportunities to test and demonstrate a hardy identity. These measures hinged on a belief that healthy bodies could resist the disorientating effects of climate and travel if they prepared and engaged well with new climates.¹²⁸

Several strategies were used. First, families ensured that Tourists spent a suitable amount of time in climates and locations that were deemed ‘northern’ in nature. This was consciously perceived as a preparatory period in which young men could safely develop their physical health, virtues and morals within political, social and religious systems that contained elements worthy of emulation. This process also enabled Tourists to build up a degree of resistance before entering the ‘south’. As will be demonstrated, the time spent in the Alps was deemed particularly important for achieving this. Second, families thought carefully about when their sons were ready to enter Italy. Upon doing so, Grand Tourists were expected to resist the negative effects of the Italian climate by maintaining physical behaviours and virtues that they had acquired in the north. These, it was argued, would guard and sustain a ‘northern’ identity while in a ‘southern’ climate. For the most part, this was an ad hoc, scattered set of beliefs and practices that were rarely directly articulated. This said, the similarities relating to Lewisham’s and Herbert’s Grand Tours suggest that elite British families also held to some broadly coherent strategies when travelling south to the Mediterranean.

In spring 1776, Herbert was at the military academy in Strasbourg. During this time, his parents and two tutors discussed where he should go next. All agreed that the success of Herbert’s Italian sojourn depended on timing it correctly, yet the question of when remained open to debate. Herbert’s mother, Lady Pembroke, was particularly vehement in insisting that her son was not yet ready:

Lady Pembroke’s ostensible concern was that her son might fall in love with an unsuitable Italian woman who would take him out of good company and compromise the benefits that might otherwise be gained from the Grand Tour. Yet her comments were framed by assumptions regarding the relationship between climate, manners and physical health – note, for example, her emphasis on the dual importance of ‘place & people’; moreover, these fears were heightened by Lady Pembroke’s conviction that any changes to her son’s temperament, disposition and body would be especially difficult, if not impossible, to reverse.¹³⁰

One of Herbert’s tutors, William Coxe, agreed that ‘your ladyship [is] much in the right for wishing Italy may be ye last place before his return home’.¹³¹ Their joint solution was to ensure that Herbert had sufficient time in the suitably ‘northern’ environments of Switzerland and Vienna, which Lady Pembroke championed as a temperate city of health, morality and fashionable elegance. After this, Herbert travelled even further north to Russia, Sweden and Denmark. During this time, he matured in his studies and social graces, undertook substantial daily regimes of exercise, and experienced prolonged periods of exposure to Alpine and Arctic hardships. When her son finally prepared to enter Italy in April 1779, Lady Pembroke believed him to be well equipped: ‘I think I am now too sure of your good principles to be afraid of your being hurt in Italy either by their bad morals, or want of Religion’.¹³²

The preparatory role played by the Alps is also made clear in the correspondence between Lord Lewisham, his tutor Stevenson and Lewisham’s father, Dartmouth. These exchanges happened as Lewisham and Stevenson explored the Alpine mountains and glaciers and prepared to enter Italy in September 1777. As Stevenson explained to Dartmouth, the duo’s time in the Alps had blessed them with health, happiness and the virtues of courage, resolution and cheerful endurance. Daily riding in the summer sun had even tanned their skin: ‘Ld L is the Colour of the best old Jamaica Mahogany; I flatter myself with being no bad counterpart to his Majesty at the Close of his Reviews’.¹³³ This change in appearance was given as evidence of health and wellbeing, but Stevenson was careful to assure Dartmouth that it was a temporary one: ‘We intend however being very Clear & handsome before we attack the Alps [referring here specifically to the Alpine crossings], as we have a wonderful magazine of Health to build upon’.¹³⁴ In assuring Dartmouth that Lewisham’s skin colour would lighten before reaching Turin, Stevenson offered a subtle reassurance that travelling in Italy would not risk a permanent change in Lewisham’s appearance or character. This promise of a successful outcome owed much to his student’s ‘magazine of Health’. In this militarized image, Stevenson conveyed a belief that health and physical robustness were not just to be stored, they were also to be expended as a defence against less salubrious regions of Europe.

On receiving Stevenson’s letter, Dartmouth wrote to his son with some carefully worded advice. He was delighted that Lewisham had performed so well on a Grand Tour that had sprawled across the societies and courts of France, the Netherlands, the German principalities and Austria, and that Lewisham had so vividly enjoyed all the ‘dangers safely passed, & difficulties overcome’. Now Dartmouth looked to prepare him for the particular challenges of an Italian society and climate. He did so by invoking the example and warning of Hannibal:

In his reference to Hannibal’s supposed use of vinegar and fire to break through a rockfall, Dartmouth directly correlated the Carthaginian’s achievements with Lewisham’s. There were, however, limits to Hannibal’s use as a role model. Dartmouth encouraged Lewisham to enjoy Italy’s ‘Luxurious sweets’ and continue his aesthetic education, but he also called on his son to remain ‘upon your guard’ against the ‘rage of passions’. That this should be achieved without the ‘dearly bought hindsight experience’ was an implicit but clear reference to Hannibal’s failure at Capua.¹³⁶

Frustratingly, few letters from Lewisham’s time in Italy survive. Nevertheless, the idea that the luxury and ease of Italy should be vigorously resisted was evident in other Grand Tour accounts. For example, as Herbert entered Italy, Sir Robert Murray Keith – British ambassador in Vienna, and someone who also knew Lewisham well – expressed his condolences that Herbert’s father, the earl of Pembroke, was making him ‘traverse all the Southern Provinces of Italy in this broiling Season of the year’. However, Keith went on to express his confidence in Herbert, since ‘you are a dutiful Son, and a hardy Soldier, you will get through the fiery Furnace with a better grace than ever a Son of Israel did, and I hope without singeing your wings, in any Shapes’.¹³⁷

Keith referred to the story in the Book of Daniel, where the Israelites, Shadrach, Meshach and Abednego, were thrown into a furnace by King Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to worship his golden statue. Joined by an angel, they remained unscathed by the flames. In a reference to the sexual exploits of the 10th earl of Pembroke during his own Italian Tour, Keith continued: ‘You made me laugh heartily by your account of the Italian impatience to know le jeune Pembroke – the Ladies will I am afraid have great Claims upon your Person – pray let me know how far you have been inclined to Satisfy them? All Italy combined will not make a macaroni of you, that is my Comfort’.¹³⁸

As discussed in chapter 1, Keith was untroubled by Herbert’s enjoyment of these women’s attention. Instead, he declared himself confident that Herbert would navigate the hazards, such as venereal disease or a tiresome inamorata, which came with these pleasures. More importantly, in both commentaries, Keith was adamant that Herbert’s British identity would remain unchanged during his exposure to the Italian climate, and that he ran no risk of becoming Italianate.

Keith’s confidence owed much to his conviction that Herbert would continue to be the ‘hardy Soldier’. Maintaining hardiness involved rejecting the indolent traits characteristic of so many Italian men. Thus, several Tourists noted their decision to walk in Venice rather than use a gondola. Gondolas, it was argued, kept elite Venetians ‘indolent, inactive and effeminate for want of manly exercise’, and permanently on the cusp of manhood.¹³⁹ Herbert’s travel diary records how he took this resistance to its fullest extent by determinedly continuing a performance of energetic hardiness in the Italian south.

While he made no reference to Hannibal, Herbert’s crucial pitting of northern hardiness against the perils of the luxurious south took place at Capua, where Hannibal ‘gave himself up to ease and pleasure’.¹⁴⁰ Travelling back from Naples to Rome in September 1779, Herbert spent the night at Capua:

In his remaining entries – written en route to Rome (which Hannibal famously never reached) – Herbert described his conscious rejection of ease and luxury. Walking through the rain and outpacing his mules and driver, he shook off the deleterious effects of Naples and restored his body to its hardy, ‘heroic’ capacity. Two nights later, Herbert assembled ‘two Tables, very greasy and dirty, putt a clean sheet over them and upon this hard Bed, I had a very comfortable sleep, till the Sun rose next morning’.¹⁴² This Lockean aversion to a soft bed was followed by a cheerful account of a day’s walking through the rain and his endurance of a ‘most violent ache in my stomach’ which eventually ‘I happily gott rid of, by a proper evacuation under a hedge’.¹⁴³ Having quite literally evacuated the Neapolitan influences from his body, Herbert rejoined his chaise and reached Rome on the following day, unvanquished.

Hannibal was a spectral presence in Grand Tour culture. Though he did not dominate discourses and descriptions, Grand Tourists were nevertheless well aware of his legendary triumphs and failures as they moved from north to south, and especially as they travelled through Italy. Moreover, examples like Herbert’s account of travelling between Naples and Rome demonstrate the importance attached to combining performance and place. In light of this, this chapter now returns to a consideration of the physical actions of Grand Tourists in Naples and when on Vesuvius.

As the southernmost point of the Tour, with its powerful otium-inducing climate, Naples was regarded as the destination where elite British men had greatest need of their capacity for resistance. Physical exertion was deemed crucial to this. The daily bathing regime of the British expatriate, Lord Fortrose in the 1770s – as described in chapter 3 – was not, therefore, simply part of a routine exercise regime. Each morning, Fortrose and his companions rowed half a mile out to sea and underwent a course in maritime survival skills. Neapolitan watermen instructed them on how to swim in a suit of clothes and strip in the water. One of Fortrose’s companions was the seventeen-year old, William Fullerton, from a Scottish gentry family. His tutor, the travel writer and scientist Patrick Brydone, later published an account of their travels in which he claimed that these daily swims had enabled the group to resist the threat of lassitude posed by Naples’s south-east wind. Such was its effect that it had given one ‘smart Parisian marquis’, full of ‘animal spirits’ and vigour, an almost suicidal depression. This led Brydone to conclude that ‘we should all of us been as bad as the French marquis’ had it not been for their daily swim.¹⁴⁴

Swimming was not a particularly common Grand Tour activity. However, almost all Grand Tourists in Naples – including the most inactive – did commit themselves to the most physically demanding element of any Italian travel itinerary: climbing Vesuvius. In doing so, they placed themselves at the heart of Italy’s dangers.¹⁴⁵ Here, in the numerous descriptions of volcanic ash entrapping their legs, of noxious gases leaving them breathless, and of the sheer degree of exhaustion, the enchanting corruption of Naples’s sweet air and the ennervating effects of its climate was perhaps mirrored in a more menacing fashion. Yet climbing Vesuvius was an idealized act of resistance that was also, implicitly, a conquest. The volcano’s weakening effects were certainly felt, but they were also overcome. Ascending Vesuvius was therefore imagined as a symbolic and literal act of hardy, vigorous exertion that was defiantly out of place in a climate of debilitating ease. This demonstrated a fixed, enduring Britishness consolidated in an act of physical prowess, hardiness and manly conduct that was fundamentally northern in nature. The English writer and literary hostess, Hester Thrale Piozzi, captured this fusion of challenge, defiance and triumph during a visit to Naples in 1785–6. Coming as part of a three-year tour of Europe after her second, controversial marriage to the Italian musician, Gabriel Piozzi, she was struck by the demonstration of British national character witnessed around and on the volcano: ‘The wonder is that nobody gets killed by venturing near [Vesuvius], while red-hot stones are flying about them so …. the Italians are always recounting the exploits of these rash Britons who look into the crater and carry their wives and children up to the top’.¹⁴⁶

The relationship between the Grand Tour and Europe’s natural phenomena has often been subsumed within the wider histories of the sublime and the rise of mountaineering. Studies such as Peter Hansen’s remarkable The Summits of Modern Man (2013), for example, located the 1741 expedition of William Windham and the Common Room club as instances of a broader cultural shift. Driven by ‘assertions of individual will and curiosity’ and the ‘abandonment of self-restriction’, their actions were, he argued, part of the onset of modernity that grew out of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and would subsequently characterize nineteenth-century cultures of mountaineering.¹⁴⁷ The nascent cultures of both the sublime and of mountain sports did indeed influence the culture of the Grand Tour. Nevertheless, the responses of young Grand Tourists to mountains, glaciers, Vesuvius – and to the danger and hardship that accompanied them – were equally and profoundly shaped by wider cultural reiterations of long-established concepts of elite masculinity, power and responsibility. The Common Room’s expedition in 1741, for example, was directly shaped by eighteenth-century elite understanding of the relationship between honour, masculinity and the confrontation of danger. As a result, the potential connection between Alpine exploration and the military was easily made. During the 1760s and 1770s – as elite men grew increasingly articulate in asserting the value of martiality and expressed a growing enthusiasm for the domestic militia, but as opportunities for continental military volunteering declined – part of the growing appeal of adding an Alpine dimension to their Tour itineraries was surely because the challenges of such hazardous natural terrains offered a suitable substitute for the battlefield as a rite and site of initiation.

In these circumstances, Grand Tourists’ performances in the Alps and Vesuvius fulfilled a similar function to their displays of sporting prowess or hunting. This shift foregrounded the nineteenth- and twentieth-century status of mountains as the ultimate test of man, but in a manner that melded it with pre-existing concepts of elite masculinity. Furthermore, in climbing mountains and glaciers (rather than simply crossing the Alpine passes), and by travelling further than Hannibal into the heart of the luxurious south (where they climbed Vesuvius and returned unscathed), eighteenth-century Tourists sought to demonstrate their capacity to outperform a legendary figure of military renown. By doing so, they also hoped to successfully complete an extensive rite of initiation that used the terrains, climates, cultures and hazards of Europe to form and test their identity. Unlike the later Romantic travellers, their goal was to demonstrate an identity that was fixed and enduring, rather than subject to destabilization.

In demonstrating how Tourists physically engaged with danger, and how they rationalized and idealized this engagement, this chapter has outlined an elite masculine identity which rested on performances and physical activities that took place within hazardous contexts. The physical and psychological challenges that confronted young men on the Tour were considerable, and normative expectations regarding their response to peril and danger were often highly unrealistic. This prompts two important questions: were Grand Tourists always as brave as their writings suggest; or did they make careful use of their subsequent rhetorical construction and textual representation to compensate for their shortcomings? The construction of the masculine self through the act of writing correspondence, diaries and other ‘ego-documents’ needs to be appreciated and assessed. The following chapter will explore the ways in which men recorded their experience of and emotions towards danger, the motivations for and outcomes of writing up these encounters, and the influence of writing for intended readerships. By focusing on retrospective construction and narration, it will reveal how Tourists crafted and framed their writings. In doing so, close attention was paid to the dangers these young men had faced and to the emotional and physical reactions they experienced subsequently. How Grand Tourists relayed and crafted their responses to peril – what they did and did not say, and to whom – was an essential component in the construction and demonstration of elite masculinity.

_______________________

1 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 154, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield, Genoa, to Mrs Baker, 13 Aug. 1764.

2 They were particularly interested to see where the battle of Lake Trasimene had been fought. See, e.g., St Andrews University Library Special Collections, MS. 38271/19/11, Walter Bowman, Florence, to Arthur Balfour, 7 Apr. 1733; Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 19941, fo. 35, Edward Thomas, Terni to Jeremiah Milles, 3 March 1751; J. Moore, A View of Society and Manners in Italy; with Anecdotes Relating to some Eminent Characters (2 vols., London, 1781), i. 459; J. Forsyth, Remarks on Antiquities, Arts and Letters, during an Excursion in Italy, in the Years 1802 and 1803 (2nd edn., London, 1816), p. 82. My sincere thanks to Rosemary Sweet for generously sharing these with me.

3 F. Moryson, An Itinerary Containing His Ten Years Travel Through the Twelve Dominions of Germany, Bohemia, Switzerland, Netherland, Denmark, Poland, Italy, Turkey, France, England, Scotland and Ireland (3 vols., London, 1617), iii. 106, quoted in C. Chard, Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour: Travel Writing and Imaginative Geography, 1600–1830 (Manchester, 1999), p. 61.

4 R. Lassels, The Voyage of Italy, part II (Paris, 1670), p. 268, quoted in Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, p. 61.

5 J. Breval, Remarks on Several Parts of Europe Relating Chiefly to their History and Antiquities. Collected upon the Spot in Several Tours since 1723 (2 vols., London, 1738), i. 73.

6 C. Thompson, The Travels of the Late Charles Thompson Esq. Containing his Observations on France, Italy, Turkey in Europe, the Holy Land, Arabia and Egypt (3 vols., London, 1744), i. 187.

7 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, pp. 193–5.

8 See C. Duffy, The Landscapes of the Sublime 1700–1830: Classic Ground (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 68–9, 72, 86; D. M. Pyle, Volcanoes: Encounters through the Ages (Oxford, 2017), p. 63.

9 H. Berghoff and B. Korte, ‘Britain and the making of modern tourism: an interdisciplinary approach’, in The Making of Modern Tourism: the Cultural History of the British Experience, 1600–2000, ed. H. Berghoff et al. (Basingstoke, 2002), p. 5; P. P. Bernard, Rush to the Alps: the Evolution of Vacationing in Switzerland (Boulder, Col., 1978), pp. 14–17.

10 C. Hibbert, The Grand Tour (New York, 1969), p. 197; R. MacFarlane, Mountains of the Mind: a History of a Fascination (New York, 2003), p. 117.

11 Duffy, Landscapes of the Sublime, p. 73.

12 A. Ashfield and P. de Bolla, The Sublime: a Reader in British Eighteenth-Century Aesthetic Theory (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 6–11; P. Shaw, The Sublime (London, 2006), pp. 1–3.

13 Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, pp. 15, 100.

14 Ashfield and de Bolla, The Sublime, p. 14.

15 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, pp. 177–8. See also K. Hanley, ‘Wordsworth’s Grand Tour’, in Romantic Geographies: Discourses of Travel, 1775–1844, ed. A. Gilroy (Manchester, 2000), pp. 71–92.

16 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, p. 195.

17 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, pp. 61, 79, 194.

18 See, e.g., Chard, Pleasure and Guilt.

19 E.g., Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 61979 A, John Holroyd, later 1st earl of Sheffield’s Grand Tour journal, 19–21 July; Add. MS. 36259, Philip Yorke, later 3rd earl of Hardwicke’s Grand Tour journal, 17–18 June 1778.

20 See M. Hope Nicholson, Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory: the Development of the Aesthetics of the Infinite (Ithaca, N.Y., 1959); K. Thomas, Man and the Natural World (London, 1983), pp. 258–61.

21 E. Burke, A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (London, 1757), pp. 52, 129.

22 Thomas Gray, Turin, to Richard West, 16 Nov. 1739, in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Jackson Toynbee, Whibley and Starr, pp. 128–9.

23 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 22998, Richard Pococke’s travel journals, 30 June–1 July 1741.

24 P. Martel [and W. Windham], An Account of the Glacieres or Ice Alps in Savoy: in Two Letters (London, 1744). See J. S. Rowlinson, ‘“Our common room in Geneva” and the early exploration of the Alps of Savoy’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society, lii (1998), 221–35, at p. 225.

25 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 1 (my italics).

26 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 3–4.

27 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 5–8.

28 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 8–9.

29 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 8.

30 My sincere thanks to Dr Amy Milka for her analysis of this passage.

31 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 130–1, Holroyd, Lausanne, to Revd Dr Baker, 20 Oct. 1763.

32 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 36259, Yorke’s journal, June–July 1778.

33 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, George Legge, Viscount Lewisham and later 3rd earl of Dartmouth, Constance, to William Legge, 2nd earl of Dartmouth, 8 Aug. 1777.

34 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

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

36 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

37 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

38 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

39 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

40 S. Bainbridge, ‘Writing from the perilous ridge: romanticism and the invention of rock climbing’, Romanticism, xix (2013), 246–60, at pp. 246–7.

41 See, e.g., G. R. de Beer, Early Travellers in Switzerland (Oxford, 1949), p. 34; J. Ring, How the English Made the Alps (London, 2000), pp. 15, 18; R. W. Ketton-Cremer, Felbrigg: the Story of a House (London, 1962), pp. 119–20.

42 P. H. Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man: Mountaineering After the Age of the Enlightenment (Cambridge, Mass., 2013), pp. 33–8.

43 Duffy, Landscapes, pp. 86–7.

44 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, William Bentinck, 1st Count Bentinck, Naples, to Elizabeth Bentinck, countess dowager of Portland, 28 Apr. 1727.

45 ‘Lord Herbert’s Grand Tour journal’, in Henry, Elizabeth and George (1734–80) Letters and Diaries of Henry, Tenth Earl of Pembroke and his Circle, ed. Lord Herbert (London, 1939), pp. 246–7.

46 Gray, Naples, to Mrs Gray, 14 June 1740 in Correspondence of Thomas Gray, ed. Jackson Toynbee, Whibley and Starr, p. 164

47 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 40759, Sir Philip Francis’s travel journal, 12 Aug. 1772.

48 J. Egerton, ‘Joseph Wright of Derby’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/30044> [accessed 15 March 2019].

49 S. Fenwick, ‘John Smith’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/25851> [accessed 15 March 2019]; J. Ingamells, A Dictionary of British and Irish Travellers in Italy, 1701–1800 (New Haven, Conn., 1997), p. 869.

50 Grand Tour: the Lure of Italy in the Eighteenth Century, ed. A. Wilton and I. Bignamini (London, 1996), p. 145; N. Spinosa, ‘Landscape painting in Naples – from a portrait of the city to scenes of strong emotion’, in In the Shadow of Vesuvius: Views of Naples from Baroque to Romanticism, 1631–1830, ed. S. Cassani, trans. S. Cragie (Naples, 1990), p. 18.

51 P. Walch, ‘Foreign artists at Naples: 1750–1799’, The Burlington Magazine, cxxi (1979), p. 251.

52 J. Egerton, ‘Henry Tresham’, ODNB <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/27709> [accessed 15 March 2019]; Ingamells, Dictionary, pp. 952–3.

53 R. Hamblyn, ‘Private cabinets and popular geology: the British audiences for volcanoes in the eighteenth century’, in Transports: Travel, Pleasure, and Imaginative Geography, 1600– 1830, ed. C. Chard and H. Langdon (New Haven, Conn., 1996), pp. 196–200; J. Egerton, Wright of Derby (London, 1990), p. 15.

54 Hamblyn, ‘Private cabinets’, p. 182; E. Benezit et al., Dictionary of Artists (14 vols., Paris, 2006), v. 394–5.

55 Wilton and Bignamini, Lure of Italy, p. 148; Spinosa, ‘Landscape painting’, p. 20; Benezit, Dictionary, vi. 991–2.

56 Joseph Spence, Rome, to Mrs Spence, 5 June 1732, in Joseph Spence: Letters from the Grand Tour, ed. S. Klima (Montreal, 1975), p. 110.

57 Joseph Spence, Rome, to Mrs Spence, 5 June 1732, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, pp. 110–11.

58 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, Bentinck, Naples, to Lady Portland, 28 Apr. 1727.

59 Spence, Rome, to Mrs Spence, 5 June 1732, in Klima, Joseph Spence: Letters, p. 111.

60 Brit. Libr., Egerton MS. 1711, Bentinck, Naples, to Lady Portland, 28 Apr. 1727.

61 ROLLR, DG7 Bundle 32/49, George Finch, 9th earl of Winchilsea, Naples, to his mother, Lady Charlotte Finch, 25 Apr. 1773.

62 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 35378, fo. 302, Yorke, Naples, to Philip Yorke, 2nd earl of Hardwicke, 31 Jan. 1779.

63 J. Brewer, ‘Sublime tourism, Neapolitan science and counter-revolution: Vesuvius and Pompeii in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century,’ paper given 24 Feb. 2015 to the Centre of Eighteenth Century Studies Research Seminar, University of York.

64 ‘Herbert’s journal’, in Herbert, Henry, Elizabeth and George, pp. 246–7.

65 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 22998, Richard Pococke’s travel journals, 19–20 June 1741.

66 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 22998, Richard Pococke’s travel journals, 19–20 June 1741.

67 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 10, 11.

68 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 5.

69 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 1, 5.

70 M. McCormack, Embodying the Militia in Georgian England (Oxford, 2015), pp. 46, 104, 126.

71 W. Coxe, Literary Life and Select Works of Benjamin Stillingfleet… (3 vols., London, 1811), i. 164.

72 For an analysis of William Windham, Plan of Discipline, Composed for the Use of the Militia of the County of Norfolk (London, 1759), see M. McCormack, ‘Liberty and discipline: militia training literature in mid-Georgian England’, in Soldiering in Britain and Ireland, 1750–1850: Men of Arms, ed. C. Kennedy and M. McCormack (Basingstoke, 2013), pp. 165, 167–8, 171.

73 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 10, 11.

74 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 11.

75 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 1, 5.

76 ‘20. in wind ( fig. from 11d) ready or fit for action of some kind. Obs.’, OED Online <http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/229181?rskey=mz5gA0&result=2&isAdvanced=fa [accessed 3 Sept. 2015].

77 J. A. Hayden, ‘Intersections and cross-fertilization’, in Travel Narratives: the New Science and Literary Discourse, 1569–1750, ed. J. A. Hayden (Farnham, 2012), pp. 8–10; C. Withers, ‘Geography, natural history and the eighteenth-century Enlightenment: putting the world in its place’, History Workshop Journal, xxix (1995), 137–63.

78 D. Carey, ‘Compiling nature’s history: travellers and travel narratives in the early royal society’, Annals of Science, liv (1997), 269–92, at pp. 272–4.

79 J. Gascoigne, Joseph Banks and the English Enlightenment: Useful Knowledge and Polite Culture (Cambridge, 1994), pp. 117–18.

80 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/33, J. C. Hippisley, Rome, to Herbert, 20 Aug. 1779.

81 J. Black, The British Abroad: the Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century (Stroud, 1992), p. 47.

82 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/34, Herbert, Rome, to William Coxe, 22 Aug. 1779.

83 WSHC, MS. 2057/F5/6, Herbert’s journal, 11 Sept. 1779.

84 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34887, fo. 170, Holroyd, Naples, to Mrs Baker, 7 Apr. 1765; ROLLR, DG7 Bundle 32/48/1–2, Winchilsea, Naples, to Lady Charlotte Finch, 18 Apr. 1773.

85 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 28; J. S. Rowlinson, ‘Our common room in Geneva and the early exploration of the Alps of Savoy’, Notes and Records of the Royal Society of London, lii (1998), 221–35, at pp. 226–7.

86 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 22998, Richard Pococke’s travel journals, 2–13 June 1741.

87 Rowlinson, ‘Common room’, p. 228.

88 I. D. Hughes, ‘Stillingfleet, Benjamin’, ODNB <https://doi:10.1093/ref:odnb/26525> [accessed 1 Feb. 2013].

89 E.g., NRO, WKC 6/24/, Patrick St Claire, Susted, to Ashe Windham, 21 July 1729.

90 NRO, WKC 7/45/9, Windham, Geneva, to Ashe Windham, 21 Feb. 1738.

91 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 1, 4, 5, 8, 11, 12.

92 For further thought on the role of curiosity in travel, see J. Stagl, A History of Curiosity: the Theory of Travel, 1500–1800 (London, 1995).

93 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 2.

94 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 8.

95 B. M. Stafford, Voyage into Substance: Art, Science, Nature, and the Illustrated Travel Account, 1760–1840 (Cambridge, Mass., 1984), pp. 374–8, 379, 400.

96 [Windham], Glacieres, pp. 1–3, 10–12.

97 NRO, WKC 7/45/9, Windham, Geneva, to Ashe Windham, 21 Feb. 1738.

98 Stafford, Voyage into Substance, pp. 381–2, 387–9.

99 See Vases and Volcanoes: Sir William Hamilton and his Collection, ed. I. Jenkins and K. Sloan (London, 1996).

100 J. Thackery, ‘The modern Pliny: William Hamilton and Vesuvius’, in Jenkins and Sloan, Vases and Volcanoes, p. 73; M. C. W. Sleep, ‘Sir William Hamilton (1730–1803): his work and influence in geology’, Annals of Science, xxv (1969), 319–38, at p. 322.

101 Thackery, ‘Pliny’, p. 73.

102 Sir W. Hamilton, Observations on Mount Vesuvius, Mount Etna, and Other Volcanos: in a Series of Letters, Addressed to the Royal Society (London, 1772), pp. 26–8.

103 Quoted in Thackery, ‘Pliny’, p. 66.

104 Quoted in Thackery, ‘Pliny’, pp. 66, 68.

105 Quoted in Thackery, ‘Pliny’, p. 68.

106 Quoted in Thackery, ‘Pliny’, p. 69.

107 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, David Stevenson, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 10 Sept. 1777.

108 SRO, D(W)1778/V/874, Lewisham, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 9 Sept. 1777.

109 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34048, Sir William Hamilton, Portici, to Joseph Banks, 22 Sept. 1778. Solander was the Swedish botanist who joined the Endeavour expedition. Greville was Hamilton’s nephew.

110 Brit. Libr., Add. MS. 34048, Hamilton, Portici, to Banks, 22 Sept. 1778. My sincere thanks to Dr Gaia Bruno for her assistance with the translation and identifying the duke.

111 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 and New York, 2017), pp. 69, 71, 74.

112 SRO, D(W)1778/III/365, Hamilton, Naples, to Dartmouth, 17 Feb. 1778.

113 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 1.

114 [Windham], Glacieres, p. 2.

115 R. Wheeler, The Complexion of Race: Categories of Difference in Eighteenth-Century British Culture (Philadelphia, Pa., 2000), pp. 21–4; F. A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, Md., 1995), pp. 7–10.

116 Wheeler, Complexion, pp. 21–3; Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, pp. 7–8.

117 Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, pp. 7–10.

118 Wheeler, Complexion, pp. 23–4.

119 See e.g, N. Moe, The View from Vesuvius: Italian Culture and the Southern Question (Berkeley, 2006); R. Miles, Gothic Writing, 1750–1820: a Genealogy (London, 1993), pp. 87–9. It is important to note that climate was not seen as the only cause of corruption. Tyrannous, greedy governments, Catholicism and a whole host of social, cultural, religious, economic and political shortcomings were also blamed (see e.g., R. Sweet, Cities and the Grand Tour: the British in Italy, c.1690–1820 (Cambridge, 2012), pp. 199–203).

120 See C. Chard, ‘Lassitude and revival in the warm south: relaxing and exciting travel (1750–1830)’, in Pathologies of Travel, ed. R. Wrigley and G. Revill (Amsterdam, 2000), pp. 188–9; R. Wrigley, ‘Mapping “mal’arai” in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Rome’, in Pathologies of Travel, ed. Wrigley and Revill, p. 208; R. Wrigley, ‘Making sense of Rome’, Journal for Eighteenth‐Century Studies, xxxv (2012), 551–64.

121 Sweet, Cities, pp. 164–5, 172, 180, 183, 185, 188–91; A. Canepa, ‘From degenerate scoundrel to noble savage: the Italian stereotype in eighteenth-century British travel literature’, English Miscellany, xxii (1971), 107–46.

122 For the link between volcanoes, politics and revolution, see N. Daly, ‘The volcanic disaster narrative: from pleasure garden to canvas, page, and stage’, Victorian Studies, liii (2011), 255–85.

123 Sweet, Cities, pp. 167–9.

124 Wheeler, Complexion, pp. 4–6, 22.

125 C. Chard, ‘Comedy, antiquity, the feminine and the foreign: Emma Hamilton and Corinne’, in The Impact of Italy: the Grand Tour and Beyond, ed. C. Hornsby (London, 2000), p. 151.

126 Boswell on the Grand Tour: Italy, Corsica, and France 1765–66, ed. F. Brady and F. K. A. Pottle (London, 1955), p. 6.

127 Quoted in A. Rauser, ‘Living statues and neoclassical dress in late eighteenth‐century Naples’, Art History, xxxviii (2015), 462–87, at p. 464.

128 Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, p. 10; Wheeler, Complexion, p. 123.

129 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Elizabeth Pembroke, Whitehall, to Coxe, 1 March 1776.

130 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Lady Elizabeth Pembroke, Whitehall, to Coxe, 1 March 1776.

131 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/27, Coxe, Strasbourg, to Lady Pembroke, 17 March 1776.

132 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/31, Lady Pembroke, London, to Herbert, 20 Apr. [1779].

133 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 10 Sept. 1777.

134 SRO, D(W)1778/V/886, Stevenson, Geneva, to Dartmouth, 10 Sept. 1777.

135 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, [unknown location], to Lewisham, 30 Sept. 1777.

136 SRO, D(W)1778/V/852, Dartmouth, [unknown location], to Lewisham, 30 Sept. 1777.

137 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/26, Sir Robert Keith, Vienna, to Herbert, 12 Aug. 1779.

138 WSHC, MS. 2057/F4/26, Sir Robert Keith, Vienna, to Herbert, 12 Aug. 1779.

139 Sweet, Cities, p. 227.

140 Breval, Remarks, i. 73.

141 ‘Herbert’s journal’, in Herbert, Henry, Elizabeth and George, p. 255.

142 ‘Herbert’s journal’, in Herbert, Henry, Elizabeth and George, p. 259.

143 ‘Herbert’s journal’, in Herbert, Henry, Elizabeth and George, p. 261.

144 P. Brydone, A Tour through Sicily and Malta (2 vols., London, 1773), i. 7, 10–12.

145 Chard, Pleasure and Guilt, p. 125.

146 H. Lynch Piozzi, Observations and Reflections Made in the Course of a Journey through France, Italy, and Germany (London, 1789), p. 535.

147 Hansen, The Summits of Modern Man, pp. 11, 33.