All the wonders, perils and bawdy pleasures of Europe in a mere 26 posts: How "travail" became "travel"

Seeing the world, visiting the cradles of civilisation and quite possibly having it off with a succession of foreign trollops was the thing to do for a young Englishman of means in the late 1700s and early 18s. College life was all but drained of fun and Daddy wasn't going to loosen his grip on the family funds till one was � what do they call it, "settled down"? � so one might as well see how the other half of the world gets on and have a bit of lusty hilarity at their expense, chalking it all up to "coming of age", eh wot?
Making the rounds of prominent cities in France, Italy, Austria, Germany and the Netherlands in those "enlightened times" became known as the Grand Tour, and that in turn gave us the word "tourist". Young British elites often spent two to four years travelling on the continent in an effort to broaden their horizons and learn about language, architecture, geography and culture and, yes, pursuing quite a lot of scandalous pleasure too.
The term "Grand Tour" was introduced by Richard Lessels in his 1670 book "Voyage to Italy", and the best known of the myriad Britons it drew was James Boswell, who naturally kept an elaborate journal, years before he started writing down everything Samuel Johnson said.
Travel was, in its finer sense, another manifestation of the Enlightenment's cosmopolitanism and interest in new vistas. The great-aunt of Thomas Coke wrote to him upon his completion of school: "Sir, I understand you have left Eton and probably intend to go to one of those Schools of Vice, the Universities. If, however, you choose to travel I will give you �500 [about $12,500] per annum." Coke was no fool and went on the Grand Tour, along with many others. In one peak year alone, 40,000 Englishmen were travelling in Europe.
Then there was the infamous spin put on the whole adventure by Mark Twain, who in 1867 was among the first Americans sampling the Grand Tour: "The Gentle Reader will never, never know what a consummate ass he can become, until he goes abroad," he wrote in "The Innocents Abroad". "I speak now, of course, in the supposition that the Gentle Reader has not been abroad, and therefore is not already a consummate ass."

The drawing shown here is from Hogarth's "A Rake's Progress". The information in the posts was scalped from Historical Text Archive, the University of Michigan, the Getty foundation and GrandTour.org.