Taking travel home: an introduction to five British women Grand Tourists with Dr Emma Gleadhill

In this presentation, we uncover the fascinating souvenir culture of British women travellers between 1750 and 1830. Dr Emma Gleadhill’s book, Taking Travel Home, explores how elite women used the objects and texts they brought back from their travels to fulfill their social, intellectual, and political aspirations—whether in the realms of connoisseurship, science, or friendship.

Key characters include forty-three-year-old honeymooner Hester Piozzi; thirty-one-year-old Grand Tourist Lady Anna Miller; Dorothy Richardson who travelled in England from the ages of twelve to fifty-two; and the Wilmot sisters who went to Russia in their late twenties. The supreme tourist of the book, Lady Elizabeth Holland, travelled to many locations, including Paris, where she met Napoleon, and Spain during the Peninsular War. This book is concerned with the whole gamut of objects these women and others collected, from fans depicting “the ruins of Rome for a sequin apiece” and the Pope’s “bless’d beads”, to lava from Vesuvius and pieces of Stonehenge.

Join Emma as she explores how these mementos were far more than just souvenirs— for women revelling in the independence and identity formation of travel, used them to form spaces in which they could create and control their own powerful travel narratives.

Dr Emma Gleadhill is a social and cultural historian, and watercolour artist, based in Melbourne, Australia. She is specifically interested in women’s history, travel, and accessing new dimensions of the female experience through souvenir culture. Emma's first academic monograph, Taking Travel Home: The Souvenir Culture of British Women Tourists, 1770-1830, was published by Manchester University Press in their ‘"Gender in History"’ series in April 2022. Her book uncovers the souvenir culture British women developed around the texts and objects they brought back with them to realise their ambitions in the arenas of connoisseurship, friendship, and science. It argues that the rise of the souvenir is representative of female agency, as women used their souvenirs to form spaces in which they could create and control their own travel narratives.

Your ticket includes tea or Market Lane coffee served before the presentation, and time to browse our exclusive range of books, gifts, and homewares at TJC Emporium.

This event is presented on-site at The Johnston Collection. Please see your ticket for details. NOTE: Tickets for this event do not include access to our exhibition-house, Fairhall. Guided tours of the current exhibition can be booked separately.

This program is generously supported by The Sir Wilfred and C H (Roger) Brookes Charitable Trust.

Image: Giuseppe Cades, Gavin Hamilton leading a party of Grand Tourists to the archaeological site at Gabii, 1793 (detail). The National Galleries of Scotland, Edinburgh.