During the 18th Century privileged young Englishmen often filled their time between a university education and the beginning of a career with an extended tour of continental Europe. The Grand Tour is in essence a British invention because by the 18th Century Britain was the wealthiest nation in the world and had a large upper class with both the time and the money to travel. The best known of the young Englishmen to take the Grand Tour was James Boswell who keep an elaborate journal of his travels and experiences. The first major guidebook to the Grand Tour was titled Grand Tour and was published in 1749 by Thomas Nugent.
The word travel shares its origins with the word travail. And, indeed often the Grand Tour took more than a year because the transportation systems of the time would not allow quick travel. As the transportation systems improved and travel became less challenging, travelers began to venture farther away to more exotic places, seeking out the wonders of the ancient world.
However, by the 1850s Thomas Cook was beginning to develop tours of Scotland which were affordable all-inclusive packages. So successful was Cook that by the 1870s Cook's Tours offered trips to all parts of the world, opening up the Grand Tour to the middle classes.
In fact, by the end of America’s Civil War, travel by ship and train had become quite routine and the rapidly growing wealthy classes in America began to take to the seas and rails to participate in the tradition of the Grand Tour.By the late 19th Century the Grand Tour had become an essentially American phenomenon. Not surprisingly, this group of newly wealthy citizens of a relatively young country found context and meaning for their lives and good fortune by thinking of themselves as heirs of a great Western Tradition. They traced their cultural lineage from the Greeks, through the Roman Empire, to the European Renaissance, particularly the Venetian Renaissance. During the Gilded Age, America's upper classes and merchant classes traveled the world visiting the great European cities and the ancient sites of the Mediterranean, as part of a Grand Tour, collecting and honoring their western cultural heritage. The example of Venice's democratic society of well-to-do merchants and traders who collected the world's wealth, loved architecture and enjoyed a strong sense of public responsibility, appealed to them on the basis that it was both what they were becoming and what they aspired to.
In 1867 Mark Twain took a sort of Cook's tour to Europe and the eastern Mediterranean, sending back dispatches to Alta California, a San Francisco paper that sponsored his trip. Later, his dispatches were published a subscription book titled The Innocents Abroad or The New Pilgrims Progress. Within its first year, the book sold over 70,000 copies, and remained the best-selling of Twain's books throughout his lifetime.
As the 19th Century progressed many Americans ventured out following Twain’s Grand Tour experience. William Randolph Hearst took his first Grand Tour at the age of 10 in 1873, spending a year and a half traveling and beginning a habit of collecting which resulted in a collection accumulated during his life that is impossible to describe. A very small part of that collection can be seen at Hearst Castle today and many more items from Hearst’s collection can be seen in virtually every major museum across America.
Besides helping to launch Mark Twain’s career as a writer and Hearst’s passion as a collector, the Grand Tour has had many other interesting and unusual effects on American culture. The bachelor President Grover Cleveland delayed marrying the much younger Francis Folsom so that she could take the Grand Tour after completing her college education. Francis became one of America’s most popular first ladies. When Leland Stanford, president of the Central Pacific Railroad, former Governor of California, Senator from California, and the man who drove the golden spike completing the nation’s first transcontinental railroad, lost his son Leland Jr. to typhoid fever during his Grand Tour, he went to the president of Harvard to seek advice on establishing a university in California. Stanford University was dedicated to the memory of Leland Jr. in 1887.
By the 1960s the Grand Tour had been adopted, in a less formal fashion, by college students worldwide who purchased ‘round-the-world plane tickets, Eurail passes, and set off with their backpacks staying in youth hostels the world over. However, while advances in transportation systems have made world travel easier and faster, a growing number of travelers are choosing to slow things down again, preferring to travel to the historic sites around the Mediterranean in much the same way Twain did more than 130 years ago, by cruise ship.