Overview

Servants Abroad presents manuscript journals by four British domestic servants who travelled to continental Europe in the second half of the eighteenth century, a period that tends to be seen as the golden age of a quintessentially aristocratic form of travel, the 'Grand Tour'. Yet if each wealthy traveller brought at least one employee, as seems a safe estimate, then more people knew this kind of travel as a period of work than as a gentlemanly rite of passage or an early form of tourism. For the first time, this volume makes first-hand accounts by members of this majority available for research and teaching. With a full introduction and extensive annotations, these texts upend the standard view of eighteenth-century travel from Britain to continental Europe, casting the 'Grand Tour' as an important episode in transnational labour history, and taking the study of working-class life writing in an exciting new direction.

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9780197267806

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Richard Ansell is a postdoctoral researcher at Birkbeck, University of London, interested in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travel. He is the author of Complete Gentlemen: Educational Travel and Family Strategy, 1650-1750 (British Academy/OUP, 2022) and several articles and book chapters on the social and cultural history of travel. He studied at Selwyn College, Cambridge, Brown University and Hertford College, Oxford, and held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship at the University of Leicester. At Birkbeck, he is currently a researcher on the Leverhulme project 'Written Worlds: Non-Elite Writing in Seventeenth-Century England'.

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