I first learned about the Grand Tour of Europe while working as a teaching assistant for a humanities survey course in undergrad. I became fascinated by the concept because I had just come off my own Tour of sorts—a year abroad doing research for a thesis I would eventually write, interspersed with frequent jaunts to whatever European city Ryanair was running a deal on. The idea of young people left to their own devices on the Continent in the eighteenth century seemed fertile ground for the sort of tropey adventure novel I had always wanted to write.
But historical fiction is always a blend of real and imagined. So here I will attempt to separate fact from fantasy and lend context to Monty, Percy, and Felicity’s escapades.
Bear with me as we take this last leg of the journey together.
The Grand Tour
In its simplest definition, the Grand Tour was a journey through the prominent cities of Europe, undertaken by upper-middle- and upper-class young men, usually after completing their formal education. The tradition flourished from the 1660s to the 1840s, and is often credited as the birth of modern tourism.
The purpose of the Tour was twofold: partly to expand yourself culturally through activities like perfecting language skills, observing art, architecture, and historic landmarks, and mingling with the upper echelons of society, and partly to sow those wild oats, and get the drinking, partying, and gambling out of your system before returning home to become a functioning member of society. Travelers toured under the eye of a guide, called a cicerone or bear-leader (a term that stemmed from the unsavory practice of leading leashed bears around the ring in a bearbaiting), and their Tour could last anywhere from several months to several years, depending on financial resources. The Grand Tour was a luxury limited to rich men, or those who could find a sponsor, and was dominated by the English, though in the 1800s some young women also toured, and the nationalities of Grand Tourists multiplied. Some Americans even traversed the ocean to make the journey.
The locations most commonly visited were the cities considered the most culturally important—Paris and Rome being the two must-sees. Those visits were interspersed with other significant cities such as Venice, Turin, Geneva, Milan, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam, and Berlin. Few Grand Tourists went to Greece or Spain, which were considered rough, inhospitable country compared to the well-trod northern routes. The wealth of most Grand Tourists allowed them to travel in style (including being carried across the Alps in sedan chairs), though the journey was not without its difficulties and dangers. The complications Monty, Percy, and Felicity encounter are all accurate to the period—Mediterranean pirates and highwaymen included. Few Grand Tourists, though, were unlucky enough to encounter both.
For more information on the Grand Tour, I would recommend The British Abroad: The Grand Tour in the Eighteenth Century, by Jeremy Black; The Age of the Grand Tour, by Anthony Burgess and Francis Haskell; and, one of the most thorough primary accounts of the life of a young man on his Grand Tour, the journals of James Boswell (who Monty anachronistically impersonates—the real James Boswell wasn’t born until 1740, but I couldn’t resist paying homage to my favorite source).
Politics
In the 1720s, the French crown was held by Louis XV, a young, sickly boy king controlled by a circle of powerful advisers, including Louis Henri, Duke of Bourbon and head of the French House of Bourbon. The duke wanted to prevent the family of the previous regent, Philippe, Duke of Orléans, from ascending the throne should the king die. He was looking to secure both his own position and his family’s, as the Bourbons had their fingers in the courts of many European powers. He broke off the marriage arranged by his predecessor between King Louis and the Spanish infanta, Marianna Victoria, because she was eight years younger than Louis and thus unable to bear children in a timely fashion. Shortly afterward, the duke was dismissed from his position as prime minister.
Beyond the engagement, politics in the French and Spanish courts were inextricably intertwined. The War of the Spanish Succession, which lasted from 1701 to 1714, resulted when King Charles II of Spain died childless, and the French House of Bourbon and the Austrian Hapsburgs each made a claim to the throne. On his deathbed, Charles II fixed the entire Spanish inheritance on Philip, Duke of Anjou, the grandson of King Louis XIV of France, putting the Spanish crown in the hands of the House of Bourbon. Many politicians saw the House of Bourbon as a threat to European stability, jeopardizing the balance of power, and the Bourbons had many enemies.
Power was a fragile thing in eighteenth-century Europe, and I have done my best to represent the political climate as it was in the early 1700s—though some timelines have been adjusted and condensed, because history rarely obeys novelistic structure.
Epilepsy
Epilepsy, or “the falling sickness” (the most common of many names used in the 1700s), is a disease that humans have been aware of and studying since ancient times, but in the eighteenth century it was still hugely misunderstood. The idea that epilepsy was a spiritual disorder and seizures were caused by demonic possession, popularized during the Middle Ages, fell out of fashion, but there was still no true understanding of its cause, or what part of the body it affected. Even the word seizure in this sense did not yet exist. All the treatments mentioned in the novel are true treatments of epilepsy from the 1700s—including healing spas, blood cleansers, vegetarianism, and drilling holes in the head, a practice known as trephination—as are the speculated causes. (One of the most common beliefs was that epileptic seizures were brought on by masturbation. Yay, history.)
Until the twentieth century, most epileptics were social outcasts, shunned by society, and the disease was classified alongside insanity. Many were confined to asylums, often kept in separate wings, away from other patients, because epilepsy was thought to be contagious. In the second half of the nineteenth century, there were institutions created specifically for epileptics. Laws against epileptics’ marrying at all persisted in both the United States and Great Britain into the 1970s.
This social stigma and isolation persists today, though our understanding and treatment of epilepsy has progressed significantly. Thanks to modern medicine, many epileptics are able to control their seizures, but most of the general population still has very limited understanding of the condition. Harmful myths such as the idea that a person can swallow his or her tongue while seizing remain prevalent. There are many different types of seizures beyond those depicted in the novel, and resources for seizure first aid and more information about epilepsy can be found through the Epilepsy Foundation at www.epilepsy.com.
Race Relations in Eighteenth-Century Europe
Black people have lived in Britain for centuries, though their circumstances have varied greatly depending on the time period, the location, and their economic station. Percy’s situation as a biracial young man raised among the upper classes of eighteenth-century England would have been rare but not unheard-of. While sexual relationships (both consensual and nonconsensual) often occurred between white aristocrats and their black servants and slaves, intermarriage was rare in high society. It was much more common among the working classes, and eighteenth-century England had a rising generation of biracial people as a result. Black and mixed-race communities sprang up around the country, particularly in metropolitan areas such as London and Liverpool.
Black and biracial people had few employment opportunities beyond servitude—though slavery had no legal basis in England, the law did not prevent people from keeping enslaved Africans and it was not officially abolished until 1833. Britain also played a large role in the triangular slave trade, and slave labor propped up the economy of the British colonies. Black and biracial people were banned from many employment situations, and servants who ran away from their masters often had rewards offered for their capture. However, safety and unity could be found among the lower classes, and not only in black communities, but also among many poor white people. The racial divide tended to grow wider the higher up you moved in society.
However, many well-respected members of the upper classes had African ancestry or were biracial, among them Olaudah Equiano, a writer and abolitionist who helped eliminate the slave trade in England; Ignatius Sancho, a literary celebrity of Georgian England; and Dido Elizabeth Belle, upon whom Percy’s situation as a biracial child in a white aristocratic home is loosely based. There are also many prominent historical figures of the time period that the history books often fail to mention were biracial, such as Alexander Hamilton and Alexandre Dumas.
Scipio and his band of pirates are inspired by a real crew of African men taken as slaves and forced to work as sailors, who revolted against their white masters and became pirates. The eighteenth century was the golden age of piracy, and pirates from the Barbary Coast—modern-day Morocco, Algeria, Tunisia, and Libya—made the Mediterranean treacherous waters for travelers (though their reach extended along the Atlantic African coast and in some places as far as South America). Ships that wanted to trade there had to pay a fee to the pirates for protection, or else risk seizure. Most of these pirates dealt not only in stolen goods, but also in human cargo, and either took their captured passengers as slaves to be sold in Africa, or held them to be ransomed back to their families for grand sums. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth century, between 1 and 1.25 million Europeans were captured by pirates and sold as slaves. The problem became so rampant that the United States declared war against the Barbary States twice over this issue in the early 1800s.
Queer Culture
The history of sexuality is tricky to study and trickier to write about, because the concept of sexuality itself is a modern one. In the eighteenth century, the general population would have had no vocabulary or understanding of any identity beyond cisgender and heterosexual, and even those were unacknowledged (and unnamed) because they were of an assumed universality. Sodomy—the most formal term for homosexuality at the time, drawn from the Bible—was a reference to the act of homosexual sex itself rather than attraction or identity. Every country had its own laws, but in most of Europe, homosexuality was both sinful and illegal, and punishable by fines, imprisonment, or sometimes death. Under the Buggery Act of 1533—which was not repealed until 1828—sodomy was a capital offense in England.
But in spite of the illegality, many European cities had flourishing queer subcultures, particularly for men (relationships between women at the time were largely undocumented and less commonly prosecuted). London in particular claimed more gay pubs and clubs in the 1720s than the 1950s. “Molly houses,” the eighteenth-century equivalent of gay bars (molly being one of many slang terms that preceded gay), were spaces where queer men could meet, have relationships, cross-dress, and playact marriages to each other. The most famous was Mother Clap’s, in London, which was raided in 1726. Some queer couples found a way to make a life together beyond the underground, and a few were even acknowledged as romantic partners by their community. (For further reading on this subject, I’d suggest Charity and Sylvia: A Same-Sex Marriage in Early America, by Rachel Hope Cleves, and the essays of Rictor Norton, a historian whose work focuses primarily on queer men in history.)
In the eighteenth century, the concept of the romantic friendship—a close, nonsexual relationship between two friends of the same gender that often involved holding hands, cuddling, kissing, and sharing a bed—flourished. Though the term wasn’t coined until the twentieth century, it is used by modern historians to express close same-gender relationships before homosexuality existed as a recognized identity. There’s no way to know how many of these romantic friendships were truly nonsexual, and how many were those of queer couples covering their relationship with the guise of friendship—though the concept is distinct from homosexuality, the two may have overlapped. Close physical relationships between friends of the same gender like Monty and Percy were common, though taking it further than friendship would have required secrecy and discretion, and in most places would have been unacceptable.
Which begs the question—would a long-term romantic relationship between two upper-class English men during the eighteenth century have been a real possibility? I don’t know. They likely would not have been able to be open about it. But the optimist in me likes to believe that the twenty-first century is not the first time in history that queer people have been able to live full romantic and sexual lives with the people they love.
And if that makes me anachronistic, so be it.