The Grand Tour (Shire Library)

I loved this book. Despite its brevity, it packs alot in. There are anecdotes from all the major spots of the tour such as Florence, Rome etc. Fashion, art, debauchery are all covered and reminds us that this artistic and secular pilgrimage could be life changing for men and women alike in various ways.

What I expected

“The people completing their Grand Tour frequently did so in a sort of itinerant herd, often sticking together, conversing solely in English and reducing encounters with the locals to an absolute minimum.”Somehow one is not surprised, and this kind of early package tourism may account for how even Englishmen as intelligent as Shelley came back remarking of the entire Italian nation, “I do not think I have seen a gleam of intelligence in the countenance of man since I passed the Alps”. Good old progressive, liberal-minded Shelley, eh?Of course, for most of the well-to-do young men who made the Tour, the point was not to meet people from different cultures, except insofar as those out to sow their wild oats were anxious to meet as many of the female inhabitants of Paris and Venice as possible, generally bringing back interesting diseases as souvenirs. Those whose tastes ran the other way were apparently well catered for in Florence, where the great chemist Robert Boyle disapprovingly called the local monks “gowned sodomites” when he encountered them in a brothel (what he himself was doing there is not specified).Another attraction for the more frivolous traveller was fashion. However much they might despise Paris as a city (“the ugliest, beastliest town in the universe”, according to Horace Walpole), it was still the centre of fashion, and it was the custom for English travellers to order a whole new suit of clothes as soon as they arrived. This of course cut no ice with folks back home who could not afford such luxuries, and the Georgian cartoonists had endless fun portraying the “macaronis” with their ludicrous hairstyles and outfits.Some Lord Littlebrains braved pirates and the hair-raising Alpine crossing simply to say they had been; for some it was a career move during which they networked and cemented relationships. Others, the magpie collectors, went to hoover up artefacts from the past for their personal collections. In many ways the Grand Tour was the genesis of the British Museum, for its nucleus was the collection of the traveller Hans Sloane, and other collectors like Charles Towneley left their swag to it in their wills. Some collectors were genuine connoisseurs; most were more on the level of souvenir hunters, and a flourishing industry of fakery and tourist tat soon sprang up to part them from their money. One collector, Sir Richard Worsley, was “determined to amass the most important collection of sculpture in the country”. Meanwhile his young wife, presumably at a loose end, decided to amass the finest collection of lovers, and had notched up an impressive 27 before the divorce came to court.One group with rather more elevated reasons for travelling was the artists, who mostly could not afford to make the Tour independently and instead went as governors or paid companions to young aristocrats. But they had really gone to study and absorb new influences, often with dramatic results as in the case of Turner and Reynolds. Scottish artists particularly favoured Rome, where there was a small Scottish community centred on the exiled Stuarts. Allan Ramsay, not put off by being robbed and almost drowned on his first visit, came back to Italy often, and Katherine Read spent three years in Venice.The numerous illustrations include Read’s “British Gentlemen in Rome”, a rather pleasingly satirical depiction of half a dozen young dandies completely ignoring the awesome ruins around them while immersed in conversation with each other – possibly a neat symbolic description of how the Tour was for many. It is typical of Rendell to take care to include a female artist, for in all his Georgian histories he is scrupulous about not forgetting the women. He also devotes a chapter to women who made the Grand Tour. They did so far less often than men, for obvious reasons of safety, but he credits those who did with rather better motives than most of the men. Though a few (like Lady Worsley) were fleeing scandal, the women usually went, not to sow wild oats or denude Italy and Greece of statuary for their country houses, but to broaden their minds. “In Italy they could hear about the physicist Laura Bassi who, in 1732, became the world’s first female professor. In France they could be inspired by Émilie du Châtelet, a brilliant mathematician who translated Newton’s Principia from Latin into French in 1749. Grand Tourists could attend salons in Paris and hear other women debate issues of the day. When these intrepid women returned to Britain they were able to become salonnieres themselves, arranging meetings for anyone interested in stimulating conversation.”This is a slim volume which doesn’t pretend to be more than an introduction to all the fascinating people and works it mentions – for those inspired to pursue the subject, there are appendices listing further reading, online resources and places to visit. It is well and entertainingly written and the illustrations, almost all in colour, are well chosen and magnificently lavish. It will broaden your horizons in a way the Grand Tour itself didn’t always manage to do for those who made it.