In Our Time - The Grand Tour

Episode Date: May 30, 2002

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the origins and cultural impact of 18th century tourism. Samuel Johnson observed in 1776 that "A man who has not been in Italy, is always conscious of an inferiority, from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see." Johnson was referring, perhaps ironically, to the vogue for The Grand Tour, which reached its peak in the 18th century. The idea was for wealthy young travellers to finish their education with an extensive trip to Europe to experience its natural beauties, its cultural treasures and, if they were lucky, its sexual permissiveness. The standard route took in Paris and The Alps and some tourists, including Byron, made it as far as Greece. But the destination, par excellence, was Italy, with its Renaissance glories and classical splendours. What drove this desire for travel? Was it genuine cultural curiosity or simply the fashion? What impact did the Grand Tour have on British attitudes to art and culture? And were diplomatic relations between Britain and Europe helped or hindered by these travels? With Chloe Chard, Literary historian; Jeremy Black, Professor of History, University of Exeter, Edward Chaney, Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts, Southampton Institute.

This BBC podcast is supported by ads outside the UK. Thanks for downloading the In Our Time podcast. For more details about In Our Time and for our terms of use, please go to BBC.co.com.uk forward slash radio four. I hope you enjoy the programme. Hello, in 1776, Samuel Johnson observed that a man who's not been in Italy is always conscious of an inferiority from his not having seen what it is expected a man should see. Johnson was referring perhaps ironically to the vogue for the Grand Tour,

which reached its peak in the 18th century. The idea was for wealthy, usually young travellers to finish their education with an extensive trip to Europe to experience its natural beauties, its cultural treasures, and enjoyed sexual permissiveness. The standard route took in Paris and the Alps, and some tourists, including Briarine, made it as far as Greece.

But the destination par excellence was Italy, with its Renaissance glories, classical splendours, and the forbidden fruits of popery. What drove this desire? for travel. Was it genuine cultural curiosity or simply the fashion? What impacted the Grand Tour have on British attitudes to art and culture? And were

diplomatic relations between Britain and Europe helped or hindered by these troubles? With me to discuss the Grand Tour, I Chloe Chard, literary historian at present at the Getty Research Institute, and author of pleasure and guilt on the Grand Tour. Jeremy Black, Professor of History at the University of Exeter, an author of

the British Abroad, the Grand Tour in the 18th century, and Edward Cheney, Professor of Fine and Decorative Arts at the Southampton Institute and author of the evolution of the Grand Tour. Edward Cheney, did the Grand Tour, as it were, came after the pilgrimages, did it take, had it some aspect of pilgrimages when it began? Did it following the route of the pilgrims?

Yes, I think so, pilgrimage in the broadest sense. I mean, there was the pagans, the pre-Christians went on pilgrimages, of course, to places like the Temple of Diana at Ephesus or the Grove of Diana at the Lagodinamee. and Christians in a sense formed their own type of pilgrimages, bringing back Christian relics in their case, eventually in the 18th century became art objects. But the evolution towards that status that you referred to,

Dr. Johnson's de rigour status, and ironically, he was one of the few that didn't go on the grand tour, took a long time. I think in the 16th century, going to Italy for religious purposes, had already been sneered at by Erasmus and so on, and it became, in fact, more or less forbidden in the effects of the Reformation. But I think the instinct to travel was too great to be put down, as it were, by a mere change in religion.

So a new excuse for travelling, a new justification for travelling, was formulated, and that was travel for education. What sort of education were they looking for? Well, it was a very broad education at first. Art, which became the prime ingredient in the 18th century, were certainly not there in the 16th century. The English were already a bit behind the times as far as art was concerned, and were only dimly aware of what we call the Renaissance in Italy.

People like Thomas Hobby, for instance, went for a very broad range of reasons to study the institutions of Italy, the fortifications, the languages, above all, perhaps the languages. In his particular case, it was to train to be a diplomat. He also was a result of his travelling around and acquiring Italian transatlantic. translated Castellione's book of manners, the Cortegiano, into English as the courtier,

which was a very influential book in the second half of the 16th century. But in his travel diaries, there's very little mention of art. I mean, he mentions Michelangelo almost by chance, hardly realizing who he is. And he mentions a fountain that he's fascinated by in Sicily. But it's a sort of 1% of the travel to a diary, whereas the equivalent diary in the 18th century would be 90% about art and sculpture and antiquities. Jeremy Black, there's a tension here, isn't there, between xenophobia and cosmopolitanism?

Yes, it's a big tension, and it's a tension that runs right through into the 18th century. It's as if the prime place that Americans in the 1950s had wanted to go on tourism to was Moscow. I mean, what you're talking about about going to Rome is you're talking about going to the ideological center of Catholicism. And Catholicism is seen not simply as a religion, but as the center of political, social and cultural pressures that people find out. unwelcome. There's constant propaganda in sermon, in caricature, in the printed word, and to therefore opt to go to these areas, as some people do do, is unwelcome to others, is a source of suspicion. And that kind of xenophobia is very potent, and it's not something that we should underrate. I mean, we've never really written a history of xenophobia, but xenophobia is an

important dimension in British cultural history. And actually to be loyalty with staying at home. To be loyal was to stay at home. And Catholicism was the great enemy, and Spain was the great physical enemy, and Spain was very, very powerful in Italy as well. So you're going into the country. And in the 17th century as well, with the rise of France under Louis XIV, who's king, from 1643 to 1715, to go to Italy, you have to go via France. To go to France itself is opting the wrong way.

Pretty well, the only place it was safe to go. It was acceptable to go where a certain number of people did go was the low countries, was Holland. So we have this interesting. tension, that it's almost subversive to go there, and yet it's daring to go there. It's education and fulfilling to go there. We're talking about a very small minority of people, but that's taking for granted. It's education and fulfilling to go there, and yet it's more loyal to one's own country, to one's own, the postal reformation tradition, to stay here. So that must have, did, was that tension felt very strongly at the time, Jeremy? Yes, the tension

was felt strongly at the time, and if you look at early newspapers, you can actually see a sense of almost that there's a cultural betrayal by the elite. You get the newspapers arguing that you get these very wealthy people going abroad, picking up vices, vices ranging from sort of syphilist to a preference for Catholicism and, you know, cultural preferences as well. And this is a betrayal of the national interest. And that idea is already potent in the 16th and 17th century.

How much interest, was there a sense of curiosity on the part of Protestants? So what were these Catholics really like? Oh, yes, there was a certain curiosity, both about Italy and about France. I mean, if you went to Paris in the late 7th, 17th century, under Louis the 14th, you are going to the capital of the most powerful European state. It's our enemy, but there's also, it is a townscape of enormous potency and power. Great new buildings, places like the Anvalid. You go out to Versailles, you can go and see Louis XIV in his court.

And this, in a sense, is, I mean, it's very close. It's three days from Calais to Paris. And it is so close, but it is very, very troubling, very worrying. And that level of anxiety, and as you correctly say, excitement, they're both present. Clare John, if the purpose of travel broadly, we can say, in the 16th and 70th century, was self-education through contact with other countries, maybe other civilizations even, what kind of instructions were there to be found on how this might be achieved? Well, there are books that offer explicit instructions about how to approach foreign places,

such as James Howell's instructions and directions for foreign travel. What does he say? Oh, he explains, as most of those sort of books do at some length, how it's necessary to extract both pleasure and benefit from the foreign pleasure and improvements, as Stern later calls it. There are also, their various travel books themselves that serve as points of reference for other travellers. But I think, in fact, the most important or most powerful guidelines for travellers about how to approach the foreign and how to write about it are provided obliquely and indirectly through, often through mockery, of travellers who get it wrong.

The whole thing about the whole purpose of travel, the whole extraction of pleasure and benefit from the foreign, is not something people agree about. It's something which is defined indirectly by accounts of how travellers have gone awry. The most famous of these is perhaps Lawrence Stern in his sentimental journey of 1768, where he mocks Smollett's travel book of two years earlier,

and he calls Smollett smell fungus and explains how he set out with a spleen and jaundice. and had nothing to tell people except to give an account of his own miserable feelings. And this is constantly repeated, travellers who fail to enjoy themselves. Anna Jameson, much later in 1826, talks about travellers who affect a nonchalance and who will dismiss the pantheon as a pigsty and the fountain of a geria as... No, the pantheon as an old oven and the fountain of a geria as a pigsty. One example of this, of course, is the constant mockery of young English.

gentlemen who go to Italy to be poxed and pillaged and to be cheated in their purchase of works of art, travellers in mocking each other are not just, they're not just rejecting particular sorts of travellers. They're defining what the whole business of travel is about. And they're also, I think, quite often, deflecting a certain unease about the difficulty of approaching the foreign fluently and confidently and finding something to say about it that makes sense of it. You find this especially often in accounts of works of art. You've talked in your work about people having authority to be eyewitnesses. Could you tell us what that means and how that enters into what becomes a travel writing of the early 16th, 17th and early 18th century?

Well, people already talk about the authority of the eyewitness in the 17th century. I think James Howell in the book I mentioned suggests that it's important actually to go to places and see things. But when they write about places in the 17th century, they often don't. say, I saw this and I saw that. For example, John Evelyn in his diary, there's in Pisa, he says Pisa, for the great history thereof, and then he sort of tells you a bit about the history, is worth seeing. And then he says nothing. He offers no kind of description of what he saw, if I remember it right. But it's worthy of seeing because of it, because of its history. But it's not necessary to, it's not necessary to detail precisely what you've seen. I think this, at some, at

point in the early 18th century, the authority of the traveller, writing as a sedentary scholar, referring to notes, referring to the classics, referring to various written or verbal sources, is to a large degree displaced by the authority to be derived simply from having gone to a place. And in addition, by having responded to the objects of commentary, to the objects of observation. Right, let's go to the 18th century then. We're talking about art and pleasure and perhaps danger. Edward Jane, you've argued that in the 80th, as I understand it, in the 18th century, it was the grand tourists who defined our ideas of art and even established our idea, the rules of taste.

How did that happen? Can you take us through that? The travel literature is one of the prime vehicles through which the English learned about art. Obviously, Italians were way ahead. And so, although literature traveled, with art and architecture and antiquities, you had to go there and see the real thing. They didn't have wonderful colour illustrations

to sit at home and admire. So they had to go there. And in the early 17th century, when James I signed a peace treaty with Spain above all in 1604, it became possible. And there was then a growing sense of urgency, really, under James I, the first, Anne of Denmark, his wife, and particularly Charles I first,

that we had to catch up. We had a lot of catching up to do. This is one of the explanations, I think, for Charles I first enormous art collection, but it's also the explanation for very distinguished figures such as the Earl and Countess of Arendal who went out on a grand tour and took Inigo Jones with him.

Inigo Jones felt it was his role to sort of single-handedly absorb 200 years' worth of Italian Renaissance architecture in one career. And I think it's a nice symbolic but perhaps exaggerated example, but to say that the first truly classical building in England is the banqueting house in Whitehall,

which is 1619. The equivalent building in Italy was the Bruneliski's in a Trinity Hospital, which is 1419, which is sort of 200 years earlier. And then through the 17th century, with again the further hiatus, I would argue, in the 1640s, although others would argue for continuity, the Civil War is a sort of second Protestant Reformation to some extent. But although royalists are trapped abroad and make good use of it, architects like Roger Pratt, for instance, and Arundel goes out to die abroad,

but entertains people like Don Evelyn, who, Chloe's just mentioned, who goes around cataloging all the art objects and things, plagiarising art guidebooks and so on for the most part, but coming back and then sitting on royal commissions and rebuilding London after the fire with Christopher Wren and Roger Pratt and others. So it's a very gradual process. But by the 18th century,

the art ingredient has become predominant and the great country houses of England, which are perhaps England's only, perhaps major, certainly, contribution to art in the world and the landscape garden perhaps, which also derive from paintings by Claude and Proust of the Italian Campania. We create the country house as a museum and replica of what we experienced in Italy to accommodate our grand tour findings, our relics. Jeremy Black, do you see the connoisseurship and consumerism, as it were,

coming together in the Edstantia, you're building on what Edward sort of so lucidly laid out, really, We've got there, we've got the taste, we're bringing it back in country houses in some parts of the city, some parts of London, but is there something, can we discuss the way that Connoisseurship developed and how consumerism seems to accompany it is perhaps too soft a word? Maybe you can...

Yes, I think that's right. I mean, I think that what you've got is that the artistic tastes get disseminated through publication, through art auctions, through people coming back, and it becoming fashionable to take an interest in Italian art. I disagree slightly with Edward about the country,

being the only major British contribution to culture. I think about things like perpendicular Gothic and a whole string of British achievements. And actually I'd also say that it's very interesting here. Edwards repeating almost the line that would be taken by people in the 18th century and earlier about the wonders of Italian architecture and Italian culture. You know, there were actually some people back in Britain

who were saying, well, you know, this is all very well, but we've got our own neo-Gothic. You get to the start of the neo-gothic in the 18th century. So I think there's a slight degree more tension there. but it certainly becomes fashionable. And you very correctly quoted Dr. Johnson, it becomes fashionable. I mean, he in a sense is almost satirizing that. And I think that there is a degree to which the British elite in the 18th century

almost lose touch of their own country, and they get more understanding of France and Italy. And it's not just Italy, it's France as well. I mean, Paris is probably the single city that most tourists visit. Whereas, you know, for example, the number of tourists that visit Edinburgh or Dublin is very small until very late into the 18th century. Until we can't go abroad. Until we can't go abroad, yeah.

Then they turn north. They discover the leg district come on. Absolutely. Then the thing really takes. Yeah, it's a fascinating thing. No single 18th century British monarch ever visited Wales, Scotland, Ireland, or such remote places as York, you know, or Nottingham or Manchester. And most of the landed elite is exactly the same.

They knew more about Paris. They knew more about Rome than they did about their own country. And that was of worry to some critics. It was a only pigeon thing. Most of them had come from France, I don't know. Well. Clouard, there was a pressure at the time to have the right response to something, as I understand it. You stood in front of the Venus de Medici and other things,

and you had to have the right response to it. This was part of your education. Can you talk about that, the correct response, and what's going on now? I wouldn't put it quite like that. People often view the Grand Tour as though there's a norm and as though people are saying exactly the same things. And of course, travellers are repeatedly, hyperbolicly, delighted by the wonders of Italy by works such as the Venus de Medici and the Apollo Belvedere. But the way I'd see it is more that there's a range of options that's mapped out.

And that there are a range of rhetorical aims and rhetorical dangers that travellers are aware of. When they're confronting something like the Venus de Medici, they're aware that lots of other travellers have commented on it. they're aware that part of what is being demanded of them is a hyperbolic responsiveness, emotional responsiveness, and aesthetic responsiveness. They're also aware of the risks of the language of responsiveness. And the main risk of the language of responsiveness is affectation that if you're going around Italy, you're praising everything, you're explaining that you've appreciated the beauties of the Venus de Medici and the Apollo, you've appreciated St. Peter's, the Coliseum, etc. You then you've One of the risks is that you risk sounding too easily impressed, but a worse risk, well, much worse risk, is the risk of sounding as though you're being affected and pretentious, as though you're being insincere, you're showing emotions which you don't in fact feel. And emotional responsiveness is seen at the time as a feminized quality, which is compatible with the manly quality of sincerity and simplicity. but if you don't achieve the impression of sincerity and simplicity, you're in danger of lapsing into effeminate affectation. Hester Piazzi, an Englishwoman who was married to an Italian,

who travelled in Italy in the 1780s, at one point where she's talking about how the Italians themselves are not affected, she says that the Italians don't really understand the way the English behave. And if they see a conceited Englishman in raptures over a Raphael, which in fact he kind of has very little comprehension of or enjoyment of, they don't understand why he's doing it, why he's putting on this appearance of pleasure. And they don't understand that if he didn't do it,

other travellers would mock him failing to extract enjoyment from the foreign. I entirely agree with Chloe about different responses, but they're even wider than that. You can also see that in behaviour. I mean, quite a few tourists, as we all know, were not actually fascinated by art. I mean, quite a few tourists. It was, you know, wild oats.

A lot of people spent their time on sex, gambling, drinking, and they aren't the people that you tend to follow through the travel literature. It's one of the problems. The travel literature is often in the sense, as it were, exalting. And, you know, this is the formal what one should be doing. But if you read, for example, the accounts of British ambassadors having regularly to get tourists out of scrapes, you know, they do something wrong. I mean, you know, there's a limit to who you can proposition, for example. You proposition somebody to senior at court. You get into trouble. There's a marvellous letter 1736. The British ambassador is having to deal with the problem that one of the dukes, the Duke of Kingston, has come back to London with the wife of a senior French official, and the French official is complaining about that, not surprisingly. Now, that kind of level and also excessive drinking among many tourists, many tourists running through vast sums in gambling, many people coming back with venereal disease.

I mean, venereal disease is as much a legacy of the grand tour among, for many individual families as, you know, the sculptures that one puts in one's garden. Yeah, the astonishing fact that young English lads were getting very, very drunk in Paris. 18, 19-year-olds took me completely by surprise. But we need to remember that. We need to remember that. There's also a sin-bin sense of Europe, isn't that? I mean, homosexuality was called the Italian vice.

And he was in Beckford, who had to go, great wealthy man, great patron. He felt he had to go away because he'd been caught in this country. And also, I presume, to further get on with what he wanted to do. Homosexuals, people who wanted to have affairs with other people. I mean, you get Henry Fox going. around with an older woman, Mrs. Strangeway's Horner, because it's quite acceptable to travel around Europe in a way that you wouldn't be so acceptable at home. You get divorced women or women that have separated from their husbands. I mean, Sir Robert Walpole's wife trundles

around Europe. She's the wife of the Prime Minister. She embarrasses British diplomats by insisting on being presented at court when she's going around with, as it were, Italian hairdressers and other men that she picks up. And this kind of world means that it's a very much more varied. You often get the underside of British culture moved abroad. And of course, for young men, it's a great thing. What do you do with aristocratic young men of 18, 19 and 20? They very rarely go to university. If they do go to university, they don't

read for a degree or complete their three years. You want them to sow their wild oats abroad. And that is a very important aspect of the Grand Tour. This is the social history of the grand tour, but in a sense it doesn't impinge on the influence through elites. Let's come back that. Let's talk about that. Let's go back to the influence on the

consciousness, the sensibility, the drive in this country towards what it thought of itself, how it thought of itself as an educated nation towards the end of the 18th century as a result of a grand tour. What was it bringing back that then fed into the general culture? Well, to go back to Jeremy's slight criticism of my summary, for example, the Gothic, and I would disagree, which we were encouraged to do on this programme, I'm sure. The Gothic had to be sneered at, I mean, a sign of being smart in the 17th century

when we finally discovered the classicism and the Italian Renaissance, to be smart. You had to disparage the Gothic. And the revival of Gothic, and Gothic with a K at the end of it, also with Horace Walpon, so, was done by people who were wanting to be even more smart, because by then it became a cliché to go to Italian and be classical. You've argued, Chloe, and you were beginning to talk about it, that travel could be a danger to the travellers' perceptions of themselves. Could you, and that this was an attraction in a way?

I think one way of approaching this is to pick up the point that Jeremy was making about about drunkenness and sexual adventure and so on. And what I'd say about that is that in the 18th, well, for much of the 18th century, drunkenness, sexual adventures, being poxed and pillaged and so on, tend to be defined as things that inadvertently happen on the course of the Grand Tour,

as though things are somehow going awry. Towards the end of the century, a new option appears of defining them as central to travel. Travel is itself, an adventure of the self, which is a potentially dangerous and destabilising. And drunkenness, in fact, is one of the activities that provides a metaphor for the dangers of travel.

In Tomslav Peacock's Nightmare Abbey, Barron appears and says he's got to go to Italy because he's quarreled with his wife. And he leaves for Italy in the midst of a riotous drinking song. He suddenly sort of decides that now is the moment drunkenly to charge off to Italy. And I think that the precondition for this is the concept of travel

as an adventure of the self, which doesn't displace the earlier concept of travel and as an occasion for gathering and ordering knowledge of the world, but it appears as an option alongside it. What happened after the French Revolution? Was there a big change then, Jeremy? Oh, yes. I mean, the French Revolution not only means that you can't go through France, but also French Revolutionary Armies take over Italy. The British, as you correctly said earlier, rediscover their own country. I mean, you've got an enormous cult of going to the Lake District, the Y Valley, going up to Scotland. You get some tourists who've got a lot of money,

going further afield. The second Earl of Landsdown, for example, goes off to North America, which is really quite wild. You get the start of a greater interest in the, in really the Orient, which the imaginative Orient means initially the Balkans and then, you know, the Near East. So you get people starting to travel there. After the Grand Tour, after the French Revolution in Napoleonic Wars end in 1815, in 1815, France becomes open again. But in a sense, tourists who go back, we've got some cases of tourists who visit France in 1815, 1816, having been there in the 1780s, And they all say it's different.

And one of the things they don't like is that there are more tourists. It's fascinating this. In a sense, part of the appeal of the Grand Tour was that you were different. You were a small group of people able to appreciate what the vast majority couldn't appreciate. And suddenly in Paris you've got lots and lots and lots of people. And that gets taken through, of course, later in the 19th century with the Thomas Cook and the mass tourism. And therefore, in order to show that you're different, what you have to do is to do two things. One, you either have to go somewhere different geographically

or two, you have to show that your sensibility is different. One of the ways that you show that your sensibility is different is by having a more refined taste than the multitude of travellers. And that actually becomes very, very clear in the 19th century that issue. Edward. Well, actually, I would argue for continuity again. I would argue that phenomenon had already happened in the 18th century for the reasons I was trying to explain,

which was sort of, you know, to show that you're different from the run of the middle grand tourist. Of course it goes, it's exacerbated when there's a mad rushed in 1815 and Byron says indeed, you know, like the equivalent of Paris, Byron says that Rome is pestilent with English and so on. A parcel of staring boo-boos who go about gaping and wishing to be at once cheap and magnificent. Yes, middle-class tourism, which he was snobbishly, these great left-wing heroes, Shelley and so on, were very snooty nevertheless about these phenomena.

Can I, if I can just ask you, I know this is tricky to do because you spend a lifetime on your various books and studies, but if you could say these two or three things came out of the grand tour, and in, say, the 1820s and 30s, what can you just give as any idea of the scale of the difference in mind? Well, I think it's what made Britain great. I mean, it's the sort of absorption, not just of art, but the whole humanistic Renaissance enterprise, and ultimately the discovery through the Renaissance of classical civilization,

Greek and Roman's classical civilization, the way in which we ran our empire was actually sort of our own version of, classical Rome, really. And that is what we got through the Grand Tour. So it's the way in which we almost became civilised through contact with Italy. Jeremy, was there a point at which the British themselves began to think, well, we're much more sufficient to ourselves than we used to be.

We've got, and then now we're pretty good. We've got Newton, and so on and so forth. Oh, yes, I think you can see that very clearly in the 19th century. I mean, people still go abroad, but there's not a sense that you necessarily have to learn to go abroad. And there's another thing which we haven't talked about. It's foreigners coming to Britain. And that was already strong in the 18th century.

People like Montesquere and Voltaire becomes even stronger in the 19th century. London is the world city. And you realize that for many people coming to Britain was a much more exciting sense of, as it were, touching a vital existence. Whereas you go to Italy and to a considerable extent you're seeing a society that is in ruins. And you can see that, obviously, you self-dramatized that with Edward Gibbon and sitting among the, you know, literally the ruins of ancient Rome. And, you know, that's a very different tourist experience. The other thing that you see in the 19th century

is increasing numbers of British tourists as they're going abroad, increasingly are disengaging with continental society. And instead of which they're climbing Swiss Alps, they're going to sit on the beach, going, for example, to the Riviera, as Queen Victoria likes to do, the French Riviera, what they're not doing is engaging as equals

because they're not interested in necessarily mixing in the salons of, you know, Milan or, you know, or the other cities. and that is a shift, and British tourism to India today is in some way similar to British tourism to Italy in the early 19th century. People go and see the wonders of ancient India. What they don't have is any real interest whatsoever in modern India. And that's very similar to the 19th century tourist to Italy.

I'm afraid we have to pull the plug. Very sorry about that. Thank you, Glow Chard. Thank you Jeremy Black. Thank you, Edward Cheney, and thank you for listening. We hope you've enjoyed this Radio 4 podcast. You can find hundreds of other programmes about history, science and philosophy at BBC.com.ukuk forward slash radio 4.