ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the agency and engagement of the servant travellers and their representation of landscape, people, and places. It considers the identity of the servants, how they represent themselves as travellers and travel writers, and argue that texts by servants such as John Macdonald and Edmund Dewes expand the typology of the ‘travel writer’ through their engagement with eighteenth-century discourses of travel. The situation gave Dewes the opportunity to go quickly back home for breakfast and say goodbye to his wife before he embarked on the trip to London and then onto the Continent. Dewes indicates his responsibility for organising meals when they are on the road. William Tayler’s experience of the accommodation in Brighton in 1837 recalls that of Dewes on his travels on the Continent. In Dewes’s diary, transgression of the boundaries is also provisional on his smart appearance.
