ABSTRACT
This chapter argues that servants were integral to journeys not only in practical and material ways but also in their narrative productions. It considers the representation of servants in a range of travel writing from the early eighteenth to the early nineteenth century, charting the different ways in which servants are employed in the narration of their employers’ journeys, and how their presence, and absence, signals larger concerns about the significance of class, and language. Travel writing about journeys to the Continent, often educative journeys describing Grand Tour destinations, was largely impersonal and factual in style. Servants came to be more visible in travel writing about the Home Tour later in the century, as travellers strove to represent the social milieu in which they found themselves and which often included local servants. In the absence of Barber, it is James Boswell’s servant Joseph who accompanies the two men on their tour of Scotland.
