Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1750-1830

Lady Anna Miller’s Letters from Italy (1776–7), is a glittering casket of textual souvenirs. Each and every page offers detailed descriptions of the sites and sights of Italy, notably shaped by her attention to the materiality of the regions through which she passed. Beyond her construction of these textual souvenirs, Miller acquired many material examples. Her purchased acquisitions included a tortoiseshell comb, its design copied from an Etruscan vase, and prints after Piranesi. At the Cumæan Sibyl’s cave near Pozzuoli, she crawled through the dirt of the cavern, pockets filled with the fragmentary forms of mosaic, agate, and intaglio gemstone.

At the tomb of Virgil, Miller plucked leaves from the branches of the famous bay tree that grew nearby, gleefully writing that ‘You may be sure I am possessed of some of the leaves of this sacred tree; how happy should I be, if drinking a decoction of them would inspire me with Virgilian poesy’ (2:336). Here, Miller gestures towards a connection between the undertaking of her tour and the practices she would eventually establish once home. Upon her return to England, Miller would establish a literary salon at her home in Batheaston. Outfitted with props, rituals, and games from her travels, including the famous ‘Batheaston Vase’, these events collapsed the experience of the Tour with her creative productions once home. Like male Grand Tourists before her, Miller drew on the cachet of continental travel and the objects that encapsulated it in order to establish herself as a proficient salonnière, which is the subject of a chapter of the present study. This dynamic relationship between home and abroad is at the heart of Gleadhill’s text. Not simply a study of women tourists, this is an account of how that travel endured in their minds, their relationships, and within their houses; that is, how that travel shaped their lives.