ABSTRACT
Travel abroad provided a great opportunity for sexual adventure. Tourists were generally young, healthy, wealthy and poorly, if at all, supervised. Many enjoyed sexual adventures whilst abroad, but it is difficult to obtain information on the subject. To a great extent it was the ‘good-boys’ such as Wharton, well-behaved young prigs such as Thomas Pelham, and the scholars, such as Pococke, who wrote lengthy letters home to their relatives. There is very little personal correspondence, other than demands for money, from those whose conduct was castigated by their contemporaries. The vast majority of the journals that have been preserved relate to blameless tourists. Philip Francis might speculate on whether he would prefer relations with the Venus de Medici or Titian’s Venus,3 but such daydreaming was banished from the accounts of his more respectable contemporaries. It is also possible that journals and correspondence may have been tampered with by descendants. There is evidence of this in several cases.
