There literally should be an anthologies -- plural -- of sources of foreign travelers (and merchants, if they are interesting enough) going through Britain in the 18th-early 19th century, but sources seem scattered. These are stray thoughts on the most interesting ones I've found from a weekend of searching.
1. Daniel Defoe A Tour Through the Whole Island of Great Britain (1710s?) is likely the most comprehensive source. Defoe certainly has access to places that a foreigner could not have, but that is it's chief fault for me: what a native sees is never what an outsider sees, and that outsider's view is my chief interest.
2. Peter of Russia's Grand Embassy of 1697-98, attempting to drum up support for a coalition against Turkey, took him through England. Although Peter himself was most infatuated with Dutch society and his trip to England
was literally an afterthought, a translated Russian source for this part of his trip would be interesting since it was more than just a diplomatic trip.
3. The
Familie Mozart took a
concert tour of Europe between 1763-66. Similar to Tsar Peter, their trip to England was unplanned. Here are tidbits from the Mozarts' stay in London:
Life in inner-city Soho obviously did not suit Leopold’s constitution and he became unwell. He decided to move the family out to a place where the air was cleaner and there were green fields. It’s a measure of how much bigger the city of London is now compared to the 18th century, because it was Chelsea that fitted the bill. They stayed at 180 Ebury Street, as a plaque on the wall of the house still bears testament. They arrived on 6 August and, before they left in September, Mozart had passed an important milestone: he had written his first symphony.
But it appears London had few redeeming features for Mozart’s father apart from its musical society. Leopold regarded England as a godless, expensive, culinary wasteland, and particularly deplored the English habit of ‘guzzling solidified fat’, by which he presumably meant dripping.
4. Joseph Haydn, after his famous invitation,
made two tours in England in the 1790s. He had a far better time than the Mozart family did.
5. James Fenimore Cooper
Gleanings in Europe: England is a section of his mammoth travel book through Europe ~1826-28. It's incidentally the first work of Cooper's that I've read.
The most interesting letters (essays) start from Letter IX onwards. In IX he has a dinner with Earl Grey and Whig grandees and notes by contrast how American manners are declining:
As the party around this table was composed of men of high rank, and still higher personal consideration, it would be unfair to compare them with the wine-discussing, trade-talking, dollar dollar, set that has made an inroad upon society in our commercial towns, not half of whom are educated, or indeed Americans; but I speak of a class vastly superior, which you know, and which, innovated on as it is by the social Vandals of the times, still clings to its habits and retains much of its ancient simplicity and respectability.
In Letter X he describes a session of the unreformed House of Commons in old St Stephen's Chapel, a drab edifice by the time Cooper saw it (if anything, plainer than even the modern House of Commons chamber). He sees two members fully asleep, stretched out on the row of benches behind the Speaker's throne-pulpit. Some
awake members are seen with one or both feet resting on the backs of the benches. British observers of Congress, seeing congressmen with their feet on the desks, said that was a reflection of moral slackness induced by Americans' infatuation with democracy. Cooper said it was because
I am of opinion political systems have little to do with these tours de forces, but that there is rather a tendency in the Anglo-Saxon race to put the heels higher than the head.
At a later dinner with Sir Walter Scott and the elderly Coleridge, Cooper takes exception to the way Coleridge impugns the honor of Commodore Rodgers of the
Little Belt Affair. That is one of the long list of abuses to national character Cooper has had to endure in his visit:
The following anecdote is also derived from the best authority. About the time nullification was rife in America, a gentleman, also in parliament, went from London to a dinner in the country. He found the Right Rev. Lord Bishop of (blank)., among the company.
"What news do you bring us from town, Mr (blank)?" asked the consecrated christian.
"No news, my Lord."
"No news! We were told there was good news."
"To What do you allude, my Lord?"
"Why, we were told there is every reason to expect a speedy dissolution of the American Union."
But you get the feeling Cooper acknowledges the British have the better argument. He
clearly hates the commercial interests starting to infest the US (this was only in 1826) as much as the better classes in England do.
These are what I found in addition Karamzin's Letters of a Russian Traveler and the German academic source that I mentioned before. The latter book helped me understand a bit better why German sources of 18th/early 19th century tours Britain are scarce: Nationalistic and liberal German intellectuals of the time used Britain as a polemical/ideological ideal -- like Voltaire generations ago -- but they didn't
comment on the country because they had nothing to compare it to from experience and literary Germans were an idealistic lot during the time period. A far, far cry from German
Wanderlust at the end of the 19th to now (or when Germans emigrated from pure desperation starting from the Thirty Years' War).