Description
Book SynopsisIn the late eighteenth-century, elite British women had an unprecedented opportunity to travel. Taking travel home uncovers the souvenir culture these women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship and science.
Key characters include forty-three-year-old Hester Piozzi (Thrale), who honeymooned in Italy; thirty-one-year-old Anna Miller, who accompanied her husband on a Grand Tour; Dorothy Richardson, who undertook various tours of England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the sisters Katherine and Martha Wilmot, who travelled to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, the political salon hostess Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many countries with her husband, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War.
Using a methodology informed by literary and design theory, art history, material culture studies and tourism studies, the book examines a wide range of objects, from painted fans “of the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece” and the Pope’s “bless’d beads”, to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.
Table of ContentsIntroduction: remembering travel
PART I: GENDERING CONNOISSEURSHIP
1 The Grand Tour: a masculine legacy of taste
2 Shopping for souvenirs
3 Creating their own cultural capital: Lady Anna Miller and Hester Lynch Piozzi
PART II: GENDERING SCIENCE
4 Every fair Columbus
5 Dorothy Richardson’s extensive knowledge
6 Lady Elizabeth Holland, the social orchestrator of science
PART III: GENDERING FRIENDSHIP
7 From diplomatic gift to trifle from Tunbridge Wells
8 A snuff-box and other Napoleonic keepsakes
9 Princess Ekaterina Dashkova’s gifts to Martha Wilmot
Conclusion: remembering the souvenir
Index
