Servants Abroad - (Records of Social and Economic History) by Richard Ansell (Hardcover)

About the Book

Servants Abroad presents the journals of four British domestic servants who travelled to continental Europe in the eighteenth century. With a full introduction, these texts overturn the standard view of the 'Grand Tour' by revealing the experiences and impressions of the majority who travelled in service.

Book Synopsis

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.

About the Author

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'.