The Rest Is History - 221. Holidays: Byron's Grand Tour

Episode Date: August 15, 2022

Welcome to the first of four episodes on the history of holidays: Byron's Grand Tour; The Invention of Mass Tourism; Sun, Sea and Sex; and Roman Holidays. In the first episode, Tom and Dominic explore the adventures of Byron, Boswell and their peers contemporaries to foreign lands, where they pursued romance, sought to improve their health, and 'acquire' authentic souvenirs. Join The Rest Is History Club for ad-free listening to the full archive, weekly bonus episodes, live streamed shows and access to an exclusive chatroom community. *The Rest Is History Live Tour 2023*: Tom and Dominic are back on tour this autumn! See them live in London, New Zealand, and Australia! Buy your tickets here: restishistorypod.com Twitter:  @TheRestHistory @holland_tom @dcsandbrook Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Thank you for listening to The Rest Is History. For weekly bonus episodes, ad-free listening, early access to series, and membership of our much-loved chat community, go to therestishistory.com and join the club. That is therestishistory.com. Thanks for listening to The Rest Is History. For bonus episodes, early access, ad-free listening, and access to our chat community, please sign up at restishistorypod.com. Or, if you're listening on the Apple Podcasts app, you can subscribe within the app in just a few clicks. And now I'm in the world alone Upon the wide, wide sea

But why should I for others groan When none will sigh for me? Perchance my dog will whine in vain Till fed by stranger hands But long ere I come back again He'd tear me where he stands dominic sandbrook anyone who has to leave behind pets when they go on holiday will be familiar with that sentiment the anxiety of coming back from your fortnight abroad to find that your dog

wants to tear you to pieces uh that was in fact, Lord Byron writing in the character of Childe Harold about, well, let's call it a holiday, a trip abroad that he made in 1809. And we'll come back to Byron. But we're looking at the theme of holidays because we're in the middle of August. This is absolutely the holiday season. People are going abroad, they're braving, you know, terrible flights, all that kind of stuff to get abroad. And we thought it would be fun to look at the history of the holiday, of people going away, going on trips, having breaks. And I guess in a sense, if we're looking at the prehistory of it, what Byron is doing, so he leaves England, he heads off for two years going around the Mediterranean.

That's very much what aristocrats are doing throughout the late 17th through the 18th century, aren't they? So it's called the Grand Tour. And I know that you've been doing a lot of swatting on this. Would you say that the Grand Tour is the precursor of what we know today as holidays? Yes, I probably would actually, Tom. Hello, everybody.

Yes, I think so. So we're going to talk later on in the week, aren't we? Or it's about Roman holidays, about their sort of antecedents to holidays. But I think obviously most people in human history never went on holiday. I mean, they were just working all the time, sort of tilling the fields or later on working in the factories or whatever they were doing. So holidays are kind of connected with the idea of leisure.

And wealth. But they're also connected, aren't they, with the idea of self-improvement. So people, what books are you going to read on holiday? Are going to go swimming are you going to take up new sports are you going to see authentic local experiences you're going to broaden your mind by going to an art gallery all these kinds of things sightseeing exactly i mean these have always been part of the sort of the holiday ethic i suppose and um britain i think particularly has a i mean britain is a pioneer of holidays, of sort of travel, because, of course, the British are tremendous travellers in the 18th and 19th centuries. But also, do you think that's because we're an island? I think it's partly that.

And I think it's also the British abroad, because it's also slightly connected with empire and exploration and so on. But the British abroad is a perennially comic subject isn't it because there's so much we basically travel with bags stuffed with prejudices snobberies normally about one another well not exclusively i mean you know also know about other people too obviously a lot of sneering about foreigners as well yeah germans in particular i guess um but yeah i think it's a tremendous subject there's lots of lots of fun to be had and i think the grand tour is a great place to kick off because that's if anyone who's did you ever go inter-railing tom when you were a youngster yeah where did you go italy went pretty much everywhere yeah i went to italy yeah germany france spain everywhere well there you go i mean

that basically is the grand tour isn't it because you set off from england um you know people who go interrailing or backpacking now from all over the world they go normally between the ages of about 18 and 25 and they go to broaden their minds to have fun they go with the promise of kind of often the promise of sex is part of it and and those things were all true the grand tour and france and italy which were obviously the two countries that were most visited by British aristocrats going on the Grand Tour, I think that they're still kind of the epicentre of the global tourism business, aren't they? I think they're the most visited. I think they are. I think they are the most visited. France, Italy and Spain. Yeah, absolutely.

But in the 18th century, why is it distinctively British aristocrats who are doing this? Is it because they're stuck on an island? Is it because the 18th century, the British are kind of having a quantum leap in terms of wealth? So are they just richer than everyone else? What's going on? There's a really easy answer to that, Tom, which is that it isn't actually the British who are exclusively doing this. We often think it is because it's the British who have actually written about this more than anybody else.

But historians are starting to notice that actually there were tons of Germans, there were tons of Swedes, tons of Scandinavians going on these sort of odysseys. But it's the British who seem to have been most... I think because the British came back, and they brought all

the... as we'll discover, they brought all the art and the sculptures they brought the aesthetic back with them so they built their country houses and kind of palladian styles they picked up in you know in in florence or sort of rome or whatever um and the british just seemed to have they just they just seemed to have become much more fixated than anybody else i think perhaps partly because of the island, because we were, and also because Britain was kind of defining itself against the continent in the 18th century, wasn't it? The age of kind of Linda Colley's Britain. Well, I suppose, but there is also the idea

of a kind of common European civilization, isn't there? I mean, for instance. Yeah, there is. A common inheritance from the classical inheritance. But also French. So you would usually go to Paris first, mug up on French. Because French was the English of the 18th century. It was the lingua franca.

You couldn't really get around it. That's right. Well, let's dig back a bit to the origins of it. So, I mean, as you will know far better than me, Tom, people had been going to Rome for centuries. So Alfred the Grey went to Rome, didn't he? When he was a little boy. So going to Rome on these sort of pilgrimages, I suppose. Well, they're absolutely pilgrimages.

I mean, that is the thing. They have kind of religion absolutely at their heart. People aren't doing that in the mid-16th century, are they? I mean, Henry VIII has no plans to go on a pilgrimage to Rome in 1540. Well, so obviously it's a Catholic thing, as anyone who's read The Canterbury Tales will know. It's a Catholic thing, but it provides lots and lots of scope for fun along the way. So go on a pilgrimage, you're likely to hear all kinds of people telling you tales in rhyming couplets great fun right nice but with the reformation obviously that falls into abeyance but it's interesting so milton goes on a foreign trip he goes to italy he goes and sees galileo

um he goes and sees the sites but there's a kind of incredible sense of of earnestness i think about about that milton is going because he his ambition is to become the english virgil and so therefore he needs he feels he needs to have seen italy before he can possibly hope to achieve that um that's true that's what he'd tell his accountant i think that's true lots of the grand tourists the original grand tourists so the very early ones. So later on, you get to the sex and the boardiness, and I'm sure we're going to have lots of that to come because I know you've got loads of boardiness up your sleeve some.

But supposedly the first, as far as I can discover, the man who really sort of institutionalized the grand tourist, somebody called Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel. So this is 1613, 1614. It's the reign of- of he's a catholic would that be yes yes the howard family exactly and it may be significant actually yes because he means he's not he doesn't have sort of anti-romish baggage and he goes he takes his wife he takes his children he goes all the way through italy and he goes to naples he and he goes with inigo jones the great architect the great sort of designer um so inigo jones at that point is best known for his masks i know you love a court mask tom love a court mask yeah so inigo jones

goes as his guide and that sort of idea that you go with a guide who's a tutor at the same time who's more sort of plugged into the art and the architecture. Yeah. So it's like a kind of guest lecturer on a cruise. Precisely. That's exactly what it is. So Arendt goes and does this and he comes back. He has tons of art. I mean, he buys things by Leonardo and Raphael and stuff. He's really into this.

Now, this is the 1610. So it's very early on to be doing all this. Yeah. But again, I mean, Dominic, this is also kind of setting a trend, isn't it? Because to this day, if you go abroad, you come back with, with tat. Uh, I mean, obviously Leonardo isn't tat, but, um, you know, you'll come back with an Eiffel tat model of the Eiffel tower or something or whatever. Exactly. Holidaying and collecting have always gone hand in hand. So obviously people don't do it during the 30 Years' War or the English Civil Wars, British Civil Wars so much. I mean, there are obstacles.

But after the end of the 30 Years' War, 1648, and then the Restoration, 1660, it really starts up again. We have the first mention of the phrase, the Grand Tour, so that's in 1670. And again, actually interestingly, going back to your point about Catholicism, it's by a Catholic priest who is abroad. He's an expatriate. He's called Richard Lascelles.

He writes a book called The Village of Italy, and he calls this the Grand Tour, and the name kind of catches on. And indeed, in that book, you know, it's your point about the earnestness at the beginning. It doesn't sound much like holiday fun, because Laszlo says the point of being of travel, he says there are four reasons to do it. They are intellectual, social, political, and ethical. Now, obviously, you have all those things still today, don't you? Plus la change. Yeah, plus la change. you have all those things still today don't you intellectual yeah i mean he doesn't this sort of

paddle boarding and um dancing in nightclubs do not feature in lasso's but then after 1660 it becomes the thing so you're it's generally aristocrats isn't it who do it you need a lot of money um and you need connections you need you need a kind of wherewithal. That's sort of what I always think of as that sort of James Bond ability to walk into the hotel and say, you know, presidential suite. Yeah, my usual, your usual, Mr. Bond. Basically, you need to be able to walk in in full confidence that nobody will say we're fully booked. Well, there's that very rather sad comment by Dr. Johnson, who, of course, was not a milord and so therefore couldn't afford to go on a grand tour. 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. Which is, I guess, speaking for, you know, whole classes of people who would love to go to Italy,

but for whom it's just kind of an impossible dream? Well, you have to be able to. So you have to have had some grounding. You have to have had an education, a classical education, so Greek and Latin, because you need to know what you're going to see. You need to be able to afford the tutor. So the tutors were called bear leaders, or they're called cicerones. So that's Cicero, Tom.

It's from the idea of... So the tutor is a sort of Ciceronian figure who will talk to you about... What could be more fun than going on holiday with Cicero? Because that's awful. It sounds absolutely awful. No, it'd be great. Cicero is a great wit.

Someone who would just talk to you about rhetoric. No, you wouldn't. All on your holiday. But it's also, the idea that it's an individual experience, it's just like interrailing in this regard. Because basically at every stop, you're surrounded by other grand tourists. You know, there are particular hotels and taverns

and it's just full of like, my Lord of Bath. Yeah. Fancy meeting you here. It's full of hooray Henrys. Let of like my Lord of Bath. Yeah. Fancy meeting you here. It's full of Hooray Henrys. Let us go out on the town. Yeah. Do you want to go and look at some Palladian architecture?

No, I want to go and get hammered. Woof, woof. I think there's an awful amount of that. I think there's... Yeah. So basically, do you want me to tell you about the route? Shall I tell you about the route?

Would you like to tell me about the route? Yeah. Yeah. Tell me about the route. You set off, you cross the channel, you go to Calais-aux- or lave and then you go to um paris and there you are instructed in dancing fencing riding all these kinds of things so you're by french dancing masters by french dancing masters so you get a bit of polish then from there you go this may surprise some

people you go to switzerland so switzerland which is not a great inter-ailing place today, it was a massive... It's too expensive, isn't it? It is too expensive, but it was not, clearly, in the 18th century. So you'd go to Geneva or you'd go to Lausanne. And the appeal of that is also because Switzerland, of course, is very Protestant. So the thinking was that this would sort of inoculate you

against excessive Catholicism later on. So Gibbon, Edward Gibbon, the great historian, he was sent to Lausanne because of his papist tendencies when he was a young man. His family thought he was becoming dangerously Romish, and so they forced him to go to Switzerland, where the sort of thin gruel and high peaks would encourage more sound views on religion.

So then from there you go over the Alps. Now, obviously, going over the Alps to us is dead easy. To them is very difficult. So you, oh, by the way, you'll have bought a coach in Paris. So this is a bit like people going on road trips and buying a car and then selling it at the end. You'll have bought this carriage, and you'll also probably have a load of servants

who will be carrying your stuff. But but when you go over the alps don't the servants carry actually carry you physically if you're lucky they will dismantle the carriage and take its pieces and carry it over the alps but if you're if you're rich really rich the servants will carry you over the house as well so that's business class that is that is business well that's business class. That is business. Well, that's first class, I think. So from there, you go to Turin or you go to Milan. You might go to Florence. And you're now looking at art. Do you go to Venice?

You go to Venice a bit later, actually. You go to... So off to Florence, you go to Padua, you go to Bologna, and you go to Venice. So Venice is obviously one of the great sort of destinations, one of the big high points, but the real high point is Rome. I mean, Rome is the place you are sort of setting out to see. And when you get to Rome, Rome is full of the infrastructure. You know, just like interrailing and backpacking, you rely on a tourist infrastructure. Rome has all the, you know, it has sort of taverns, it has hotels. It has painters who will paint picturesque scenes for you. It has entrepreneurs who will sell you tat,

so who have huge ranges of sort of supposedly antique busts and stuff. And there will be people who will act as middlemen and all that kind of thing. And then from there, you will go to Naples. And Naples, as you will know, Tom know you'll get to see herculaneum and pompeii so the excavations and herculaneum started in 1738 in pompeii in 1748 so you know you're basically seeing live archaeology and you're and if you're if you're smart you're carrying off loads you're like grabbing the stuff and putting it into your, getting your servants.

You're elganing. Exactly. Yeah. That's exactly what you're doing. I'm right, aren't I, that Naples, I mean, Naples at this point is what? Almost as large, I mean, maybe larger than London and Paris. I mean, it's. Yeah, it's about the third largest city in Europe.

And a great kind of mecca in its own right. I mean, it's got opera houses. It's got its own court. It's tremendously fashionable. Yeah, so Naples has got everything. So Naples doesn't just have, I mean, it does have the opera house and it does have the sort of the patina of cosmopolitanism and sort of high culture, but it also has the picturesque.

So as you're getting later on in the 18th century, and sort of romanticism is beginning to... So you're getting Vesuvius, aren't you? To loom. Vesuvius, yeah. So there's a story about a woman called hester lynch piozzi she went to naples in 1789 she said to her she pointed at the suvius and she said to a friar is that the famous volcano and this friar said yes that is our mountain which throws up money for us by calling foreigners to see the

extraordinary effects of so surprising a phenomenon so obviously you know for the italians this is all great that all these people yeah all these sort of prince harryish figures atelier with being carried by servants with tons of money um but obviously as well as the sort of so i know you find the art stuff very potentially very boring tom so i'll keep this to a minimum i don't i no i don't i don't but go on so they bring back the aesthetic so of kind of palladianism of neo-classical art and architecture so they do all their country houses in this style so stourhead you ever been to stourhead yes stourhead exactly or stow where they drowned a village um put a lake over it and built kind of classical temples around it

it's fantastic yeah it is good if i was a mere lord that's exactly what i would have done i mean Found a village, put a lake over it, and built kind of classical temples around it. It's fantastic. Yeah, it is good. If I was a mere lord, that's exactly what I would have done. I mean, Stowe House in, where is that? Buckinghamshire, I suppose? I mean, that is absolutely spectacular. Another National Trust house. Again, done in this sort of Italianate neoclassical style,

clearly informed by the Grand Tour with all the busts and the statues and so on. And these things are deliberate imitations of what people have seen abroad. I mean, often the things that they're stuffed with have literally been taken. So there's a bloke called Richard Boyle, 3rd Earl of Burlington. He went on tours between 1714 and 1719. So these are often multi-year. You know, you don't just go there and back in a month. You could be away for two or three years.

And he brings back, do you know how many crates of marbles and paintings and vases he brings back with him? 40. 868. Okay, I didn't remotely get near that. That is a haul, isn't it? That really is a haul. That is a very, very impressive haul.

What did he do with it? Did he put in his house kind of or was his house big enough well it must have been yeah or maybe build an annex i would assume he had multiple a townhouse and a country house yes i guess yeah um i mean i would love to have gone on the grand talk the one thing i would not have done however is to bring back the foreign fashions which is something that we talked about in our podcast about anglo-italian relations for euro 2020 so the the macaronis people with this sort of massive hair and with high heels and so people bringing back um italian it or sort of frenchified fashions and they as the century wears on they get more and more grief from the kind of satirical prints and

new sheets and things yeah because they're kind of increasingly steeplingly high wigs don't they and all that um can i just tell you my favorite guy who went on a grand tour is james boswell he's both a splendid fellow and a terrible fellow isn't he boswell yes um his his experience of the grand tour is is a magnificent one so he. So he's the son of a Scottish laird. He's come down to London. He's made friends with Dr. Johnson. And he's going off on what will become a two-year trip around Europe. And there's this kind of very moving description of him. Dr. Johnson has come down to bid him farewell. And he johnson standing on the pier and then kind of rolling off with this kind of rolling gate and um off boswell goes to the netherlands full of vows

you know he's going to be good he's going to be moral he's going to be everything johnson would want and immediately it's kind of woof woof he's straight off he's uh you know i mean he just can't keep it in but he he keeps getting attacked by sort of, he's got to be improving. So he'll have a kind of week of going around all the brothels and then he'll say, no, I've got to stop this. I've got to improve myself. And so he is in Germany and he gets to Berlin and he thinks, do you know what I'd really like to do? And this is actually quite a theme of the great tour. You don't just want to go and see sights. You want to go and see famous people. And so Boswell thinks I'm going to go and see sights. You want to go and see famous people.

And so Boswell thinks, I'm going to go and see the two most famous people in Europe, Rousseau and Voltaire. And so he also, from Germany, goes to Switzerland. So you were saying about how Switzerland is a regular stop off. And he goes to Motier near Neuchatel in switzerland where rousseau is staying and he writes this letter to rousseau i am a scots gentleman of ancient family now you know my rank i am 24 years old now you know my age 16 months ago i left great britain a completely insular being did he have leon neeson's voice knowing hardly a word of french i have been in holland and in germany but not yet in france

you will therefore excuse my handling of the language i am traveling with a genuine desire to improve myself i have come here in the hope of seeing you so that's exactly how he spoke dominic and he finishes off by by by saying i have a presentiment that a truly noble friendship will be born today. And Rousseau is kind of notoriously grumpy, but he says, fine, come along. So Boswell goes along and he asks Rousseau, you know, they have a chat. Boswell's very personable, very interested, very interesting person. Rousseau gets on quite well with him. Boswell ends up saying basically to Rousseau, will you become my mentor?

Will you, I suppose, become, we know, will you become my bear leader? I can't think of two more different men. Yeah. And Rousseau basically says, no, I won't. I don't want to do this. And what's more, I'm in pain. I need a chamber pot. And so he rushes off to sit

on the chamber pot and russo instead of getting the message follows him and continues to kind of ask him questions about liberty and all this kind of stuff oh god and russo's last words to him is be off so off. So at this point, Boswell has got the message. And so he does go and he goes off to see Voltaire, who is equally quite welcoming. And again, they have a kind of long chat. Voltaire obviously finds Boswell hilarious and kind of in the end tells him to bog off as well. So Boswell then goes off to Rome, does all the usual stuff. But then he goes to Corsica, which is in the middle of a kind of great romantic rebellion, revolution. And he hangs out with Pasquale Paoli, who is the great kind of romantic Corsican leader.

And that's been suggested to him by Rousseau. And so Boswell has a lovely time there kind of playing the romantic and this you know again this is an absolute theme that and we'll see it again with byron that you go off and you meet people in you know if you're if you're kind of doing the extreme grand tour you don't just want to stick to rome or naples you want to go off to remote mountainous locations and meet exotic people with extraordinary facial hair, that kind of thing. So Boswell then goes back through Europe and he has an affair with Rousseau's lover and housekeeper, Therese. That's poor, but maybe is that revenge for the way Rousseau treated him?

No, not at all. I think he clearly fancied Therese when he'd met her, when he'd been with Rousseau. And he'd been writing to Therese quite a lot. And Therese basically, I think, ends up feeling sorry for him. And they have an affair. And Boswell goes back home. He takes Therese with him. By this point, Rousseau is in London. And so he drops Therese off and never tells Rousseau that he's cheated on him. Wow. But the thing that I think really marks Boswell out as an archetype, and again, we'll see this in Byron, but we see it, you know,

I speak for myself as someone who went to India on a year off, on a gap year, and came back kind of festooned in Indian fashion. Tom, I can't believe you were such a parody but boswell comes back with a full corsican outfit oh you didn't do that which of course nobody else has please tell me you didn't do that he is not dressing up as a macaroni he's dressing up as a corsican freedom fighter right and so whenever there's a ball he will turn up in this corsican freedom fighter outfit and to begin with it cuts a tremendous dash but after about three or four people are starting to snare and so boss will get this message and he packs it up and

puts it to one side that is very funny did you come back with indian garb from your time in india i'm not going to say i can see from your expression we that you did. I think we should go to a break here. We should do. But Tom, did you not go and, did you not seek out famous people when you weren't travelling? No, I didn't do that. See, I did. My friend Simon and I sought out the secretary of the Bulgarian football union, Boncho Todorov.

Did you? When we were in Sofia and we introduced ourselves. And how did that go? Do you know, it went absolutely brilliantly. We went to his office and we said, we're two young men. Did he speak English? Actually, I'm being very unfair because I'm leaving out Simon's girlfriend, who was also a president.

So there was actually three of us. But I mean, I don't think she had a great stake in meeting Boncho Todorov. He did speak a bit of English. Why did you have a great stake? Well, I'll explain. We've come all the way from England. And this will not surprise listeners at all. We said, we're from Oxford University in England

and therefore very important. Could you give us free tickets for Bulgaria's crucial World Cup qualifier against Russia at the National Stadium tomorrow? And unbelievably, he said yes, and he did. Well, I suppose if you don't ask, you don't get, do you? Well, exactly. I mean, people talk about the entitlement of the Oxbridge educated. Was this just after the...

This is 1990s. So I suppose kind of visiting Oxford students was still a novelty at that point. I think a bit of a novelty, yes. I didn't then come back and dress as a Bulgarian. A Bulgarian. From the 1990s i mean that they were that was a very shell-suited aesthetic then if i could have done i could have done maybe a national team shell suit maybe who knows for our next rest is history club get together

um which you of course can be present at dear listener if you join the rest is history club maybe i should wear a bulgarian shell suit And Tom, you can wear your Indian garb. Yeah, in national dress. There's nothing more boring than people talking about the holiday, so I think we should probably at this point... We could be doing that all week. And when we come back, let's have a look at what, while the Millords are going off on their foreign trips,

what is happening in Britain. Okay, jolly good. See you in a minute. I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.

If one could but go to Brighton. That is, as all readers of Jane Austen will recognise, is the exclamation given by both Lydia Bennett and her mother in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice. Dominic, we have moved on from the 18th century to the Regency period. And the Regency period, of course, is caterminous with the Napoleonic Wars. And the Napoleonic Wars make it difficult for Milords or indeed anyone else to go on travels across the continent. And so Britain's upper classes, upper middle classes have to gain a kind of vocational self-sufficiency. And Brighton obviously is one of those places. And I suppose the other one is another place beginning with B, Bath. So what's the story of how Bath and Brighton

become the kind of honey pots for Jane Austen style tourists? Well, I suppose you could say that Bath and Brighton are two of the world's first modern holiday destinations, couldn't you? So Bath is first, and they're both to do with doctors. That's really interesting. So the interweaving of health and holidays, the idea that you travel, you go on a break, you go for the, you know, now we think of as people will say, I need the sea air, you know, I need sunshine, I crave sunshine, you know, all that sort of stuff. It'll feel refreshed.

I'll come back a new man or new woman. That goes back to the sort of late 17th, early 18th century. And one of the first people who really popularized this was a guy who was a doctor from Hampshire. He was of Italian descent, actually. His family were called Guidotti, but he called himself Thomas Guidott. And he moved to Bath in 1668. So he's a doctor. And he publishes a series of sort of investigations into the waters of

bath because of course bath you know it's the name so it's a spa and it's been a spa since roman times so um he his book his most successful book is called a discourse of bath and the hot waters there also some inquiries into the nature of the water of St. Vincent's Rock near Bristol, published in 1676, and with its catchy title, proves a tremendous hit. Flying off the shelves. Yeah, absolutely. And so people are generally, I suppose, it's the age of politeness, of civility, of gentility. People are more interested in their health.

You get all these sort of martyrs to their health in the 18th century so people and people are looking to escape you know booming expanding um sort of increasingly polluted indeed increasingly industrial london so they start going to bath bath is rebuilt in georgian style gets the the theater and he gets the pump room and so by the middle of the circus doesn't it gets the circus exactly do you know the circus was modeled on is it the it's been the subject of a podcast we've done quite recently golly stonehenge is it modeled on stonehenge yeah so the the the proportions are modeled on stonehenge and because the circus provides the model for the modern day British roundabout,

you could say that the roundabout too is an homage to Stonehenge. Anyway, I just throw that out. Very good. If listeners have enjoyed that, please direct your comments to Tom and not to me. So anyway, Tom, if you had gone to Bath on holiday in let's say the 1740s or 1750s,

what would you have done first? What was your first thing I've done when you, when your coach, your stage coach arrived? I would have taken snuff. Well, what, but then what would you have done? I would bow to the, to the ladies. Not bad, but you should have gone to see Bonash. Of course, Bonash. Yes. Because Bonash is the most important person. Yeah have gone to see Bonash. Of course, Bonash, yes. Because Bonash is the most important person. Yeah, tell me about Bonash. Remind me about Bonash. So Bonash is this sort of self-appointed...

I mean, we should say it's not bone ash, is it? So it's not like a kind of a burnt bone. It's Beau, B-E-A-U. It's Beau as in the French word, beautiful. I don't think he was christened Beau. I think that's just a sort of, he's a a dandy like bo brummel uh so he will meet you if you're a new arrival and he will decide whether you're you're suitable to join this sort of the smart set who are called the company and these are people who have kind of the bon temps

these exactly these are people who get to pre-book all the sort of tables and who get to um i think i would set you up with women to dance with the balls uh these are people who get to go and join the card tables and sort of go walking with the right people and all of these kinds of things and so bonashash is the sort of – he is the sort of the oyster. He is the social facilitator. He is the – you know, he sets people – he's the matchmaker. He sets people up. He brings people together. He's the pimp.

He's the pimp. Really what you're saying. It's a very harsh way of describing. Yeah. And so this is the sort of – yeah, so that's Bath. You know, you go there if you're basically um you've got to be pretty well off i would say you've got your aristocratic or your sort of very very sort of high end of the kind of rising middle classes because you wouldn't want to go otherwise and

be snubbed by boat by bone ash would you no you absolutely wouldn't be awful you get off you get out your coach and there's a lot of a mid to late 18th century stuff satirising Bath and saying it's actually awful. And all the people in it are actually, you know, just the most terrible people. And that, I mean, that is setting a trend that runs right the way through the history of tourism and holidays, isn't it?

Is that places that become very fashionable, immediately people turn against them. Everybody hates them. So there's a brilliant book by Tobias Smollett called The Expedition of Humphrey Klinker. And one of the characters in that is this really grumpy Welsh squire called Matthew Bramble. And it's an epistrary novel, so it's all letters. And he writes to one of his friends and he says, I'm not going to do a Welsh accent because my Welsh accent just turns into Indian. He says, you must know I find nothing but disappointment at Bath, which is so altered that I can scarcely believe it's the same place I frequented 30 years ago.

I believe you will not deny that this place, which nature and providence seem to have intended as a resource from distemper and disquiet, has become the very centre of racket and dissipation. A national hospital it may be, but one would imagine that none but lunatics are admitted. And truly, I will give you leave to call me so if I stay much longer at Bath. So, you know, we're able to say it's a bad place. Now, the other places you mentioned, it was Brighton.

So Brighton, again, it's a doctor who sort of sets that up. So Brighton wasn't even called Brighton at the beginning of the 18th century. Do you know what it was called? Brighton's Helm or something, isn't it? Brigham's Helm or something like that. Bright Helmstone, which I think is a much better name. So there was a doctor, a local doctor called Richard Russell, and he wrote it. You thought that title was catchy. He wrote a dissertation called Der Tabbe Glandulari, in which he basically said it was about your lymphatic glands and about how seawater would sort them all out,

drinking seawater and immersing yourself in seawater. Is this actually medically the case? No. Or is he just making it up? No, any listeners tempted to, please do not follow and do not then, especially American listeners, do not sue us because you have followed

seawater prescriptions. That would be a very, very bad idea. I want to distance myself from Dr. Russell. But they go there and they drink seawater. Yeah, loads of doctors. So there's a guy called John Aswitter. There's a guy called Anthony Relon. And they are pumping out pamphlets and books saying, come here, get in the sea, have a swim, drink a load of seawater.

You'll be as right as rain. Is that because they genuinely, I suppose they do believe it? Or is it because they've bought up a whole load of clinics and guest houses along the seafront well dr russell who was the originator of the seawater business he definitely he bought a plot of land in brighton and um he bought himself a he built um the biggest house in Brighton where he could put his patients and the garden opened onto the beach. And, of course, you know, I mean, who knows? I don't think we know enough about him to know whether this was him,

you know, sensibly capitalising on what he thought was best for people. I don't think it is a scam from the beginning, actually. But, I mean, to be fair to him. We're being too cynical. To be fair to him and all these other quacks. I mean, there is a case, isn't there, for saying that they are onto something. Because presumably before this period, people aren't going, you know, people are not seeing the seaside as anything attractive. It's kind of wild and dangerous and the haunt of smugglers and such like.

Right, exactly. And you wouldn't go anywhere near it. But in fact people do find the sea restorative i mean that's why people go to the region i mean if there's any listeners i mean no doubt there are a lot of listeners who have been chuckling as we have at the idea of drinking seawater and and all that stuff but i mean how many of our listeners enjoy wild swimming or think that going for a really bracing walk on the beach you know well it'll blow the cobwebs away i mean i say that to you know whenever we go bracing walk on the beach you know will it'll blow the cobwebs away

i mean i say that to you know whenever we go for a walk on the beach and just one of my my wife gets kind of glaring at me even before i say it she says you always say that when we go for a walk i can really imagine you stamping along a kind of shingle beach with your your dirty wig and a staff and a frock coat absolutely shaking your stick at macaronis would i drink a load of salty water i mean i just think i wouldn't be able to be sick um well anyway this this turns brighton into this um into this great sort of great destination people go there to take to sort of drink sea water and get in the get in the sea now here thing. Dr. Russell, the guy who you've accused of being a scam artist, he dies in 1759.

And his huge house... He's drinking too much seawater. Presumably. Salt poisoning. His huge house... He's made entirely of salt by the time of his death. Lot's wife.

Yeah, they open him up and there's just seaweed Inside anyway listen His house is let to big Because it's the biggest house and do you know who rents His house Prince Regent The Duke of Cumberland friend of Scotland Oh Butcher Victor of Culloden

So the Duke of Cumberland Inherits his house And the future George IV Goes to visit the Duke of Cumberland because the Duke of Cumberland is very kind of hard drinking fast living and enjoys playing cards and gambling as does the future Prince Regent so there the future George IV gets this absolute taste for Brighton later on when he gets in he's he's been told off for spending too much money and so on. This is about three or four years later. And I don't know if it's the government or his father

or whoever has said, you're living this dissipated life in London. And he says, oh, no, no, no. I'll turn over a new leaf. I'm a new man. I will rent a farmhouse in the country. And he rents a farmhouse in Brighton, next to Brighton, so that he can just he rents a farmhouse in brighton next to brighton so that he can just crack on with his old life in brighton this time he sets up an establishment for um his mistress there he obviously later on uh commissions the royal pavilion in brighton the the royal pavilion for those who haven't seen it or heard of it yeah is this um it's it's kind of indian fantasy isn't it with domes and cupolas and all kinds of things a kind of fantasy conjured up from you know fantasy of india is that the kind of prototype for las vegas and disney world and the idea of that's a good

comparison extraordinary buildings that that enable a destination to kind of in its own right become a tourist destination yeah i think yeah i think that's a really good comparison. Extraordinary buildings that enable a destination to kind of, in its own right, become a tourist destination. Yeah, I think that's a really good comparison, actually. It hadn't occurred to me, the Las Vegas comparison. But I mean, that's exactly what people do in Las Vegas when they build reproductions. And it's all about gambling, isn't it, as well, Brighton? It is all about gambling. But going back to the first half of this episode, when people are building their country houses and they're building imitation Roman temples and things. I mean, how different is that from las vegas not that i mean okay they're not gambling although they they may be gambling privately um but so brighton does have critics

so the most famous critic is jane austen everyone thinks that jane austen hated brighton but actually she didn't so you quoted pride and prejudice um but she did go i mean she went swimming she um she went she used a sort of bathing machine people had bathing machines because obviously people hadn't learned to swim so the machine had sort of had steps and it was pulled by a donkey into the sea and um so there was there was somebody who worked on it called a dipper and the dipper would help you in sort of lower you into the water and this is what happened to jane austen i mean that's a job that didn't exist 20 years before i assume no not at all yeah i mean so that's an example of tourism providing employment

yeah absolutely um i would hire a dipper now if i mean i like swimming but it would give me enormous satisfaction to have a dipper anyway tom i think you have a regency you just as you had boswell up your sleeve, I think you have another rake up your sleeve. Well, I've got Byron. We began with Byron. So alert listeners will have noticed that I mentioned how Byron went off on his tour in 1809.

And they will be alert presumably as well to the fact that Battle of Waterloo is in 1815. So where was Byron going? Well, he goes with his friend, John Cam Hobhouse, and their unbelievably British valet, William Fletcher, who is absolutely the embodiment of the Englishman abroad, suspicious of the food, doesn't speak a word of the language, all that kind of stuff.

So they go to places that are open to British millords, namely Portugal, Malta. And then they kind of follow, you know, rather a bit like Boswell going to the mountainous reaches of Corsica, they go to Albania and they meet this guy called Ali Pasha, who is a very glamorous figure. He's supposedly subject to the Sultan in Constantinople, but in fact, he's very much set up on his own business. He's a great one for the kind of exotic facial hair, flamboyant costumes. And in fact, these kind of flamboyant costumes that Ali Pasha and his Albanian henchmen are wearing, Byron gets one. So exactly as Boswell had got a Corsican outfit, Byron gets an Albanian outfit.

And when he comes back, he has himself painted wearing it. And in a way, this becomes the absolute archetype, I think, of the tourist going abroad, the backpacker, the guy on the gap year, whatever, going abroad, coming back with a ludicrous costume, wearing it. It's just that Byron was probably the first to do it and certainly the most stylish. And so he's always got away with it. Anyway, so from Albania, Byron goes on to Greece, which of course is still under the Ottoman Empire, is very, very remote. Although it absolutely part of the, you know, the romantic imagination Byron has studied Greek at school.

It's images of the Parthenon and all that kind of stuff is absolutely in his, his mind's eye, but it's very, very wild. And he goes on to Constantinople. He comes back and he writes this up as an unbelievable, you know as the archetype of the romantic poem. And Byron is describing bandits in the hills of Albania. He's describing the Parthenon. Athens is just a scrubby little village. He's describing the glories of of constantinople and for a a travel starved british

public this is dynamite you know this is michael palin on acid for them they they become obsessed and it becomes the best-selling poem ever in english publishing british publishing really by miles by absolute miles and byron becomes a superstar. He wakes up, you know, I woke up and found myself famous, he famously said. Yeah. But then in 1816, he has certain personal problems, namely that he has been committing adultery with his own half-sister. And this generates a great scandal. Byron goes abroad again.

And as he sets off across the channel, and now, of course, he can go to France because the Battle of Waterloo has been fought. He again will immortalize this in Childe Harold. So he writes another canto of Childe Harold. for I am as a weed flung from the rock on oceans foam to sail where air the surge may sweep the tempest's breath prevail and on he goes through down the Rhine to Switzerland to Italy to Venice Florence Rome but of course what he's doing now is much more conventional because he's taking the route of the grand tour. And although he is kind of casting himself still as this doomed, lonely, romantic figure, the truth is that actually he's just putting into poetic form everything that the mid-lords have been doing through the 18th century. But there is an added complication that makes the reality of Byron's trip and provides a kind of context for Childe Harold, these third and fourth cantos of Childe Harold, that's almost pathetic, which is that by now, going abroad is not just for millords. So possibly the most famous

passage in Childe Harold is where byron goes to waterloo you know this place of skulls the grave of france he calls it and he imagines the famous ball held by the duchess of richmond on the eve of waterloo there was a sound of revelry by night and belgium's capital had gathered then her beauty and her chivalry and bright the lamps shone over fair women and brave men but by this point it's not just byron who is going to waterloo and writing kind of you know beautiful poetry like that you are getting basically all kinds of people mill owners uh prosperous lawyers all kinds of riffraff that byron wouldn't be seen dead with. And that, Dominic, I think is ushering in a new age, isn't it? It's an age of what will become

kind of a mass tourism. And again, we talked about how the British invent with Brighton and with Bath so much that is, I suppose, a continuum running into the modern day, the modern tourist industry. But there's also a sense, I think, in which post-Waterloo, the Regency period going into the Victorian period, the British are also inventing so much that we would associate with the modern tourism industry. And so I think we should look at that next time, shouldn't we? We should continue this. We should make an entire series of it because as usual, we absolutely should. We have,

I think exactly that. I think next time we will look at, um, the advent of mass tourism. So the, the shadow of Thomas Cook and Cook's tours of, of railways of steamships, um,

of resorts, not just in, um, in Britain, not seaside resorts, but in Germany, in the United States. And then we will go on from that eventually into the 20th century and who knows beyond. So we'll see you then.

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I'm Marina Hyde. And I'm Richard Osman. And together we host The Rest Is Entertainment. It's your weekly fix of entertainment news, reviews, splash of showbiz gossip. And on our Q&A, we pull back the curtain on entertainment and we tell you how it all works. We have just launched our Members Club. If you want ad-free listening, bonus episodes and early access to live tickets, head to therestisentertainment.com. That's therestisentertainment.com.