Enfilade

From Manchester UP:

Emma Gleadhill, Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750–1830 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2022), 312 pages, ISBN: 978-1526155276, £80 / $120.

Taking Travel Home provides a cultural history of the travel souvenir. It situates the souvenir at the crossroads of competing ideas of what travel stood for which were fought out amongst a rapidly growing constituency of British tourists between 1750 and 1830. Drawing from the theory of the souvenir as a nostalgic narrative instrument, the book uncovers how elite women tourists developed a souvenir culture around the texts and objects they brought home to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, science, and friendship. Ultimately, it argues that souvenirs are representative of female agency during this period. For elite women, revelling in the independence and identity formation of travel, but hampered by polite models of femininity and reliant on their menfolk, the creation of souvenirs provided a way to prove their claims to the authority of the travelling subject.

Emma Gleadhill is a Sydney-based historian and artist.

C O N T E N T S

Introduction: Remembering Travel

Part I: Gendering Connoisseurship
1  The Grand Tour: A Masculine Legacy of Taste
2  Shopping for Souvenirs
3  Creating Their Own Cultural Capital: Lady Anna Miller and Hester Lynch Piozzi

Part II: Gendering Science
4  Every Fair Columbus
5  Dorothy Richardson’s Extensive Knowledge
6  Lady Elizabeth Holland, the Social Orchestrator of Science

Part III: Gendering Friendship
7  From Diplomatic Gift to Trifle from Tunbridge Wells
8  A Snuff-box and Other Napoleonic Keepsakes
9  Princess Ekaterina Dashkova’s Gifts to Martha Wilmot

Conclusion: Remembering the Souvenir

Index