Travel Journals and Other Traces of Servants on the Grand Tour

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This paper introduces and goes beyond my recent edition, Servants Abroad: Travel Journals by British Working People, 1765–1798 (2024). The so-called ‘Grand Tour’ is one of the most elite-focused topics in eighteenth-century historiography, but – if each noble or genteel traveller brought at least one employee – more people knew this kind of travel as a period of work than as a rite of passage or an early form of tourism. The last few years have been an exciting time for work on this overlooked majority, with recent work from literary and historical angles. My volume presents the journals of three valets and a maid, kept on journeys through the Low Countries, France, Germany, Italy and the Ottoman Empire in the second half of the eighteenth century.

I will use these journals to explore servants’ work, their relationships with employers and other domestics, their agency over their own mobility, their specialisation over repeated journeys and their engagement with the cultural objectives of travel. The provenance and materiality of the journals also allow me to think about what foreign experiences meant to the writers in later life. The paper looks beyond Servants Abroad in several ways, however. It introduces the journal and sketches of another valet who belies the usual exclusion of servants from the visual culture of the Grand Tour. It also recognises that first-person journals are eye-catching but limited sources, in need of setting alongside other evidence, particularly for the experiences of Black, South Asian and continental European servants in travelling parties from Britain. Together, this range of material gives a sense of the labour that underpinned the Grand Tour, and a fuller picture of how a quintessentially aristocratic phenomenon was entangled with European and global mobility by working people.

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The Institute of Historical Research (IHR)
Senate House
Malet Street
London
WC1E 7HU

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