The Impact of Travel to France

Abstract

‘Without their assistance, how should we be able to dress ourselves, or our victuals?’ exclaimed Mrs Clark of the French in Samuel Foote’s satirical play A Trip to Calais (1776). Her attitude captured one of the central features of the discussion of tourism, its relationship to the greater tension between cosmopolitanism and xenophobia. This tension was personified in Foote’s play, which made fun of Frenchified British travellers in the person of the francophile Luke Lappelle, who complained: ‘there’s a roughness, a bourgoisy about our barbarians, that is not at all to my taste.’ The more robust Gregory Gingham exclaimed: ‘victuals! soup, that tasted as if wrung from a dish-clout, and rags stewed in vinegar, are all the victuals I have seen’; leading Lappelle to respond: ‘Ah! poor Gingham has a true English stomach; nothing will do but substantials; he has no taste for ragoutes, intermeats, and rottis.’ Sixty years earlier, the Tory foxhunter satirised by Joseph Addison in the Freeholder of 15 March (os) 1716 expostulated: ‘he did not know what travelling was good for, but to teach a man to ride the great horse, to jabber French, and to talk against passive obedience … that he scarce ever knew a traveller in his life who had not forsook his principles and lost his hunting seat.’

In our way we stopped and made a sort of dinner at a little town called Ornans situated in the midst of the rocks where the people were so remarkable lively good humoured and curious about everything relating to us, as our clothes, carriages etc. that it was impossible not to be struck with them.

Georgiana, Countess Spencer, 1763¹