FINE TRAVEL writing in any century exists primarily in accounts by individual travellers recording their immediate personal responses to people, places, historic scenes, natural phenomena, seemingly strange diurnal activities and the like, which fascinate or repel, excite or instruct them. In the case of travellers on the Grand Tour, the immediacy of record was ensured by their addressing readers who were as eager to receive their intimacies as the writers to send them. Letters—the most intimate and direct form of written communication—were directed to individuals who were of great personal consequence to the senders: a parent, close relative, long-standing friend or patron who had a vivid existence in the writer's memory and imagination. Those imagined persons come alive to the modern reader: we cannot fail to create a multidimensional image of George Lyttelton's father or Joseph Spence's mother, Boswell's old friend Johnston, Barry's patron Edmund Burke, or Caroline Lennox's ennobled and much-loved sister Emilia. Their interests, anxieties, experiences and prejudices are readily deduced from letters written exclusively to them. Inevitably we become engaged in their concerns, as voyeurs perhaps — certainly as favourably-minded observers.

This volume, then, is not a guidebook for the Grand Tour. It provides an opportunity to explore the wide variety of motives, achievements and reactions of a diverse collection of specific individuals travelling. Their language is faithfully presented without modernisation or editorial interference, wherever possible direct from the actual autograph letters they sent.