Introduction

MY FIRST THOUGHTS about a contribution to this volume were to write an essay about the impressions Suffolk made on those travellers who journeyed through the county in the eighteenth century – Celia Fiennes, Daniel Defoe, William Gilpin, François de la Rochefoucauld, and especially the accounts of others less well known. As journeys by the new turnpike roads became easier after the 1750s, sprung carriages more comfortable and the literature to guide them more plentiful, increasing numbers of the upper classes felt the urge to travel. They set forth each summer to appraise the regions of Britain, many of them articulating in highly personal terms their experiences and impressions in letters, diaries or journals.

Samuel Johnson approved of these exercises. He advised travellers to regulate their imaginations by reality, to see ‘how things may be, to see them as they are’. Travellers therefore wanted to become familiar with inns and roads, the state of towns and trade, to assess the impact of cathedrals, churches and public buildings, to imbibe spa waters, to enjoy an assembly and, above all, to view the country houses of the nation's ruling class. Visiting the latter to acquaint themselves with art, architecture and garden design became a key component of upper-class culture and behaviour. Sadly, Suffolk was never on the recognised routes of most eighteenthcentury travellers. And, when it was, those who recorded their journeys half dismissed it in their haste to get to Norfolk to view the Palladian splendours of Holkham and Houghton, that brace of houses at the top of the list of any traveller with even the most perfunctory interest in architecture. When Charles Lyttleton, dean of Exeter and later bishop of Carlisle, set out from London in August 1758 on an East Anglian country house jaunt he wrote to his friend, the amateur architect Sanderson Miller, ‘It surprised me a good deal to find that in so large a County as Suffolk and so near theMetropolis, not a single Gentleman's Seat that I saw or heard of, except the Duke of Grafton's at Euston, had been improved in the modern taste.’