This chapter examines the ways in which Grand Tour narratives developed through the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and contributed to the conception of Europe in that period. It includes Joseph Addison’s Remarks on Several Parts of Italy &c (1705), Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy (1768), and Mary Wollstonecraft’s Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796) and argues that in the later eighteenth century the description of Europe via a part (classical Italy) gives way to an emphasis on the particular. Recent critical attention to slowness, microspection and proximate ethnography in travel writing studies is applied to Grand Tour sentimentalism and satire in order to propose the value of reading such texts as examples of vertical travel. Late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century women’s contributions to Grand Tour writing and discourse rearticulated some of the motifs of stillness and intimacy popularised by earlier writers such as Sterne but introduce new frameworks for thinking about Europe which include its possibilities as a site for shared, familial experience.

In the eyes of other nations, Britain was a colonial, maritime, and mercantile country, whose still strong interests in Europe were expressed largely culturally. This perception made the Enlightenment a broadly recognizable movement, carried on over national boundaries and concerned with ideas such as ‘the modern’, of religious toleration, of progress, of the ‘science of man’ so strongly supported by David Hume, and of human (or rather, white and masculine) dignity. It self-consciously located itself geographically in Europe and chronologically in ‘the modern age’, which, after much debate in the early part of the century, it saw as superior to that of the Greeks and Romans, in spite of their immense cultural legacy, which was shared by all Europeans. Yet in the end, this chapter argues, in spite of a shared ancient legacy, Britain remained pulled in two directions, the colonial and imperial on the one hand, and the European on the other.

The Alpine sublime contributed to the Romantic vogue for mountains, but also to the development of Romantic aesthetics and modern subjectivity. This chapter examines a variety of representations of the Alps, including scientific and aesthetic treatises, poems, prose fiction, and painting, as well as more ephemeral documents such as travel journals and visitors’ books. Authors addressed include Rousseau, Ramond, the Duchess of Devonshire, Wordsworth, the Shelleys, Byron, and Ruskin. It argues that the Alpine sublime served as an expression of divine power, human autonomy, and social distinction. Proceeding chronologically, the chapter begins with the Grand Tour, with its scientific, aesthetic, and mythical representations of the Alps, then looks at how the French Revolution appropriated the Alpine sublime, at ways in which Romantic writers responded by making it a private experience, and finally at how tourism helped generalize this modern attitude to mountains.

Chapter 3 explores the genre of travel writing to illustrate the transformation of the Swiss myth from a progressive to a more conservative narrative. After briefly reviewing the Whig ideology of the Grand Tour, I look at how William Coxe’s various editions of his Sketches of Swisserland responded to two French translations by the republican writers Louis Ramond de Carbonnières and Théophile Mandar, and to a competing travelogue by the radical British expatriate Helen Maria Williams, all of whom struggled to redefine the meaning of republicanism. I argue that these three works exploited the contradictions in Coxe’s text in order to modernize his Whiggish ideal of liberty, and in Williams’s travelogue at least, to make the case for revolution in Switzerland. Centering my analysis on the aristocratic republic of Bern and on the rural democracies of central Switzerland, I look at the various textual strategies that enabled these writers to make Swiss liberty a Whig, then radical, and finally Tory political trope.

In his travel diary for his 1886-87 tour of Europe and Africa, Frederick Douglass reveals the racialized context of his travels abroad. Douglass’s comments on race, slavery, and the presence of his black body in various spaces disrupt the conventional capitalist and dominant narratives about tourism, travel, and leisure. Early in the trip, he notes that other passengers on the transatlantic voyage do not seem “disturbed” by his or his white wife Helen’s presence, and on board a steamer bound for Egypt, he expresses gratitude that, born a “slave marked for life under the lash,” he is “abroad free and privileged to see these distant lands so full of historical interest.” Douglass’s attention to his and others’ racialized relationship to various kinds of spaces, histories, and labor emphasizes the ways in which nineteenth-century black travelers reframe conventional ideas about mobility and leisure.

The establishment of Naples as an independent kingdom in the eighteenth century not only drew the European diplomatic corps to the city but also initiated a broad civic renewal and beautification of the city. Although Naples had been a cultural and musical capital of Europe since the previous century, the coalescence of political stability and social renewal with the intertwined network of artistic institutions (conservatories, theaters, churches, and patrons) propelled the kingdom into continental prominence. The city became a destination point for the vast number of travelers moving across the continent in search of pleasure, leisure or of “knowledge” (particularly regarding the reclamation of antiquity), or simply to follow prevailing fashions. These travelers – often young, affluent, educated, and with ties to aristocratic birthright – headed south for the “Grand Tour.” As a “must see,” Naples became an obligatory stop, and the experiences of travelers were immortalized in numerous books, journals, periodicals, travelogues, memoirs, visual arts, etc. Their reflections often merged around the broad themes of natural phenomena, the patrimony of ancient civilizations, and the unprecedented diversity of entertainment (above all, opera). Through these wide-ranging sources, this chapter documents how Naples entered the public imagination as a broad ideal of culture.

Starting with Pompeo Batoniߣs bravura portrait of The Honourable Colonel William Gordon, 1766 (Fyvie Castle), this chapter considers painted portraiture as a vehicle through which educated, socially privileged young Scotsmen like Colonel Gordon, the 8th Duke of Hamilton and James Boswell fashioned their identity while on the grand tour in Europe. Drawing on the published and unpublished accounts of travelling Scots, including Dr John Moore, the Duke of Hamiltonߣs tutor, grand tour portraits by artists including Pompeo Batoni and Nathaniel Dance are considered as potent means for representing, disseminating and reproducing familial and homosocial relations. In much the same way that the grand tour was seen as a means for transcending geographical barriers and cultural stereotypes, so we will see how Scots in Italy are imaged first and foremost as inclusively British, rather than exclusively Scottish, while engaged in this social and geographical rite of passage across cosmopolitan Europe.