ABSTRACT
This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book draws on attention to servants, who, despite their essential work in facilitating leisure travel and participating in it, have received scant focus either in the travel writings of their employers or within travel writing studies. It addresses the figure of the servant in travel writing of the period by upper-class travellers, the majority of whom were travelling, if not for leisure, then to undertake their own projects for self-improvement or discovery. The book explores the servants’ texts in the historical context of their respective touristic and textual histories. It discusses the encounter between the servant and foreign people and places on tours of the Continent. The book aims to examine in Britain and also discusses servants’ experiences of the Home Tour, which was aside from the Grand Tour the other dominant mode of leisure travel in the late eighteenth century.
