Taking travel home

The souvenir culture of British women tourists, 1750–1830

Emma Gleadhill

• Editore: Manchester University Press
• Anno: 2022
• ISBN:
  9781526155269
• Argomento: Histoire
• Categoria: Histoire prémoderne

In the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science.Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War.Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, the book examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans "of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece" and the Pope's "bless'd beads", to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.

Part I
Gendering connoisseurship

1
The Grand Tour: a masculine legacy of taste

In the late seventeenth century, the Grand Tour became established as a rite of passage for noble and gentry men. Narrowly defined as a period of Continental travel undertaken by an elite young man of rank after school or university, just prior to entering adult society, the Tour was a significant marker of distinction between adolescence and adulthood in the eighteenth century.¹ The ideal Grand Tourist was expected to spend time in France to perfect his manners and conversation by socialising with the beau monde, before travelling to Italy to experience the ruins and art of classical civilisations that had been the subject of his humanist education based on Latin and Greek models.² As their empire expanded, Britain's elite drew parallels between their nation's political virtue and that of ancient Rome, positioning the classics at the apex of their cultural heritage. ‘A man who has not been in Italy’, Samuel Johnson observed in 1776, ‘is always conscious of an inferiority,- from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see’. According to Johnson, this was because ‘All our religion, almost all our law, almost all our arts, almost all that sets us above the savages, has come to us from the shores of the Mediterranean’.³

The Grand Tour was an opportunity for the Augustan-styled elite young man to rid himself of the two main markers of adolescence – a lack of control over one's emotions and bachelorhood. In order to return home a man, he was expected to engage in drinking, gambling and sexual exploits while safely ‘out of sight and out of mind’.⁴ These independent activities and the self-reliance wrought by travel were expected to ‘wean him from the dangerous fondness of his mother’ and imbue him with the adult characteristics of courage, honour, self-control and a stoic endurance of hardship.⁵ At the same time, through a standard curriculum of mixing with polite society, acquiring accomplishments (such as the French language, dancing and swordsmanship), viewing churches, colleges, libraries and ruins, and taking note of trade, government, architecture and artworks, the Grand Tourist would gain a formal and experiential education in politics, statecraft and antiquity. Ideally, he returned home accomplished and experienced, a patrician man. A collection of antiquities and artworks attained in Italy would support his social status when displayed appropriately in the neo-classical interior of a Palladian-style estate, like that of politician Richard Child, first Earl of Tylney's Wanstead House, for example, with its six Corinthian columns, or banker Henry Hoare I's Stourhead, with its temples to Ceres, Hercules and Apollo.

This development of cultural capital through a humanist education, a carefree, youthful romp, the building of a collection and institutional affiliation was something from which women were excluded. Paintings of the Tour, like Johan Zoffany's The Tribuna degli Uffizi (1772) and Joshua Reynolds's portrait of Members of the Dilettanti Society (1777–79), show that the exclusive homosocial comradery developed on the Tour continued to shape elite men's lives long after. These paintings depict groups of men socialising and exclude women, except as objects of masculine desire. The only women in Zoffany's painting of the central room of Francesco de Medici's gallery are the paintings and sculptures of Venus, Madonna, Cleopatra and Charity, which are surrounded by gawking male Grand Tourists, art dealers and collectors (see plate 1). The commissioner, Queen Charlotte, was clearly unimpressed to receive this male group portrait. It was reported that the King ‘expressed wonder at Zoffany having done so improper a thing as to introduce the portraits of Sir Horace Man – Patch, & others. – He sd. The Queen wd. not suffer the picture to be placed in any of her apartments’.⁶ Membership of the Society of Dilettanti was a function of Continental travel experience, status and simply being a man.⁷ According to Horace Walpole, ‘The nominal qualification [for membership] is having been to Italy, and the real one, being drunk’.⁸ In the Dilettanti group portrait Sir John Taylor, first Baronet, delicately pinches a woman's garter between his forefingers as he gazes out at the viewer with a twinkle in his eye, while Sir William Hamilton (whose inauguration the painting commemorates) and the others compare an ancient vase to their wine glasses (figure 1.1).⁹ Thus, the antiquities that elite men brought home from their Grand Tours continued to connect them over the years as they became politicians and leaders through fond memories of shared adolescent debauchery that matched that of the ancient Romans and could only be undertaken in the extraordinary space of travel.

1.1 William Say (after Sir Joshua Reynolds), Members of the Society of Dilettanti, 1812–16, 580 mm × 418 mm, mezzotint.

The ideal of the classically educated elite male Grand Tourist, however, was not stable and uncontested. From the two decades prior to the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars (1792–1802), British manhood was increasingly defined against a foreign and effeminate other.¹⁰ Discussions of the ‘Macaroni phenomenon’ reflect the increasing concern that foreign travel compromised the ma...