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  • Memoirs on the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond, 1748–1775 by Thomas Hammond
  • Conrad Brunström (bio)
Memoirs on the Life and Travels of Thomas Hammond, 1748–1775 by Thomas Hammond, ed. George E. Boulukos
University of Virginia Press, 2017. 400pp. US$45. ISBN 978-0813939674.

This fascinating publication promises to offer a valuable contribution to our understanding of a variety of well-established eighteenth-century genres. The text may well also prove something of a taxonomical conundrum, given the variety of ways of framing its contents. Thomas Hammond's memoirs present a working-class autobiography. This book also contains a travel narrative and a salvation narrative, told from the relatively unusual (English) perspective of a convert from Protestantism to Catholicism. Hammond's origins and upbringing were obscure and unpromising, but the range of experiences and observations he gathered as he travelled across France, Italy, Switzerland, and Portugal is extraordinary. His related experience is a version of the Grand Tour that brings us as close as we have ever come to a servant-class experience of what it felt like to cover long distances in the eighteenth century.

In his lengthy introduction, George E. Boulukos provides much valuable context for the memoir, making intelligent biographical speculations where direct evidence is lacking. Perhaps even more useful might have been a more extended effort to show how Hammond's memoir can creatively complicate long-standing assumptions regarding various well-known literary forms. In the meantime, the discussion of eighteenth-century [End Page 242] sport is particularly welcome, as is Boulukos's recognition of the importance of sport as a means of forging distinctive and opposed national identities. An equally valuable aspect of the introduction consists of a demonstration of the editor's careful attempts to find corroborative information that can establish the veracity of Hammond's account. These evidential discussions reinforce the compelling nature of the truth claims made by the substance of the book.

Hammond's own voice, as it emerges from these memoirs, manages to sound innocent and astute at the same time. He is never afraid to express wonderment and surprise at the novelty of his experiences. His personality, as it gradually unfolds, demonstrates stubbornness, intellectual curiosity, courage, emotional vulnerability, and a keen sense of his own independent judgment. Hammond's professional world is one of constant misfortunes, betrayals, recoveries, and opportunities. He frankly records his disappointments, while exhibiting a remarkable capacity to reinvent himself.

His negotiations with his "betters" reveal him as a man with a firm (if unreferenced) Lockean sense of the contractual nature of power and its commitment to reciprocal obligations. As he declares to his early employer (known as "the old man"): "'Why Sir,' says I, 'have I not served you faithfully these five year? And as you already told me that you cannot raise my Wages any higher, I must of consequence seek to better myself'" (38). From this assertion of mobility, the rest of Hammond's extraordinary tale unfolds. One of the critical insights he offers and demonstrates is that French nobles lived on far more amicable and familiar terms with their servants than English nobles. Indeed, the multilingual and open-minded Hammond emerges as far more cosmopolitan in his outlook than most of the English aristocrats who ambled across France and Italy as tourists in the decades preceding the French Revolution. Yet he is no mere chameleon, and he is prepared to censure various unfamiliar cultures and practices he finds to be cruel or wasteful. He diagnoses bullfighting, for example, as "the remains of the ancient Pagan Games of horrid & cruel Barbarity, which the Spaniards alone of all European Nations seem still to have retained" (169).

Hammond is skilled at detailed and careful observation of not only equestrian sports, but also costume, cuisine, and custom, and he takes a keen interest in just about anything he deems instructively different from the experience of his unhappy English youth. His early life in Cambridgeshire appears to have been extraordinarily precarious, with casually extreme violence meted out daily. It comes as something of a relief to the reader when he arrives in France and begins a far more rewarding, peripatetic existence as...

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