Servants Abroad: Travel Journals by British Working People, 1765-1798

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.