Grand Tour of England

[Statilius the Epicurean]

For your typical 18th century aristocrat there were two main attractions of the Grand Tour: to be educated in the monuments and artworks of especially Roman antiquity and the humanist outpouring of the Renaissance it inspired, and to be educated in the fashions and manners of refined French and Italian high society. England didn't really figure much here, being more bourgeois and with less of a classical heritage than southern Europe. So nothing to do with the Grand Tour really.

Does this mean England was "remote from a continental perspective"? Absolutely not. Anglophilia was huge in France and Germany for much of the century: Voltaire was exiled in Britain and published his Letters on the English comparing the mixed parliamentary constitution, religious toleration and science and industry of Britain favourably to that of absolutist, obscurantist France of the Ancien regime, and Montesquieu and Rosseau visited in his footsteps. Goethe and other German writers held up English literature (especially Shakespeare) as an inspiration to escape from under the tyranny of French classical models. Italian singers, musicians, painters and other artists swarmed over the channel to where there was obscene amounts of money to be made in London's burgeoning market economy that compared favourably to the courts of continental Europe, and a craze for all things foreign and sophisticated.

Then you have the phenomenon of Scottomania at the end of the century with Ossian, Robert Burns and Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, with Romantic artists from across the continent tramping around the Highlands they imagined as the last wild frontier of Europe, more remote to people in Paris (and London and Edinburgh!) than Virginia or Bengal were.

I'm surprised you mention Chopin and Mendelssohn (Queen Victoria's favourite, even wrote an English oratorio Elijah that was his most popular piece during his lifetime) because music is about the most obvious example of what a magnet England was to the rest of Europe. Handel obviously moved there and became a British citizen, performing Italian opera with singers like the castrato Farinelli; JC Bach was known as "the London Bach" for his long stay at the royal court there; the child prodigy Mozart visited on his own "Grand Tour" (and I believe rejected an invitation to move to Britain as an adult); Haydn took London by storm and enjoyed the greatest success of his life in several year-long stays. It's practically a who's who of 18th century music, because as I said above foreign artists could make an absolute fortune in England, the richest country in Europe at the time and in awe of foreign musicians to the exclusion of its own talent.