Context 170 - December 2021

C O N T E X T 1 7 0 : D E C E M B E R 2 0 2 1 57 Happy accidents of the Grand Tour An amusing computer game for those of an intellectual bent is searching the online Oxford Dictionary of National Biography for clichés. Thus we learn that 21 of our noted forebears were ‘a countryman at heart’ and, I am sorry to say, a full 94 failed to ‘suffer fools gladly’.We also learn that 437 embarked on the ‘Grand Tour’. Our heritage owes much to the Grand Tour, participants of which returned with vast quantities of art, artefacts and architectural ambitions. The theory was simple. After gaining (or often not gaining) their degree from one or other of the ancient universities, (mostly) privileged (mostly) young (mostly) men went off on an extended tour of (mostly) France and Italy to gain the skills they needed for a career in politics or diplomacy. A special bonus for the parent was the opportunity to procrastinate for up to three years on proper decisions about their son’s future. The fashion kicked off in earnest after the Restoration, and by the early 18th century there were enough Grand Tourists around for societies to be formed. The Society of Antiquaries dates from 1707 and the elitist Society of Dilettanti from 1734. The latter was dismissed by the writer and politician Horace Walpole for its members’ alleged greater love of wine than antiquities; but then he might know – on his own tour he parted company with the poet Thomas Gray, his friend from Eton and Cambridge, supposedly because Gray was disappointed by Walpole’s preference for parties. Quite a lot is known about the Grand Tour, or at least about those aspects that tourists were prepared to divulge in journals and letters home. One account by Joseph Addison, from a generation before Walpole and Gray, with the snappy title Remarks on several parts of Italy, &c. in the years 1701, 1702, 1703, brings to bear the unusual standpoint of a learned classicist. At 27 Addison was older than most Grand Tourists, having already for several years been a classics don at Magdalen College Oxford. Addison is best known for his articles in The Spectator of 1711–12. These are written in the relaxed style required of a daily paper: gentle lectures and satires expressed in punctiliously polite terms. Many of them revolve around a cast of imaginary characters, the Spectator Club, each of which represents a social stereotype, such as the country squire Sir Roger de Coverley. Frequent topics are everyday human foibles and, particularly, fashion. A noted target was women’s extravagant headdresses and quasi-masculine riding habits with tricorn hats, examples of which can now be seen on the walls of galleries everywhere. Clearly millinery was always big business: 196 subjects in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography had associations with milliners or millinery. While Addison’s political career was set back by the regime change of 1702,Walpole was luckier. He had been elected to Parliament (by way of the rotten borough of Callington) in his absence, presumably arranged by his father, the prime minister. Eventually Walpole’s parliamentary career was eclipsed by his prominence as a writer and his architectural legacy – Strawberry Hill, often cited as the first manifestation of the gothic revival. He had acquired no Grand Tour classical ambitions; he may have taken his gothic predilection with him. This was not a gothic revival that would have been recognised by Pugin. Even to Walpole it was just an architectural style which was adaptable to his main interests: architectural asymmetry, interior decoration and the picturesque, on each of which his influence, through his writing, was considerable. Walpole coined the word ‘serendipity’. These days we tend to use this word to mean a happy accident but Walpole’s definition was more specific. To him it was a discovery made possible by one’s own ‘sagacity’, such as Addison recognising ancient sculptures from their descriptions by Ovid, Horace, Manilius and Juvenal, or conjecturing that a particular statue was an illustration of a poet’s words. Walpole accused Addison of having ‘travelled through the poets’ rather than through Italy. One question: how could Thomas Gray’s working single mother afford to finance him through Eton, Cambridge and a Grand Tour? Answer: she was a milliner! James Caird A drawing by John Carter of the library at Strawberry Hill