Servants are an unknown quantity at the heart of the Grand Tour, one of the most elite topics in eighteenth-century historiography. If each noble or genteel traveler brought at least one employee, then more people knew this kind of travel as a period of work than as a rite of passage or an early form of tourism.In this talk, Richard Ansell will introduce this hidden majority through four texts that appear in his forthcoming volume, Servants Abroad: Travel Journals by British Working People. These are Thomas Addison’s journal for France and Italy (1765), Edmund Dewes’s diary for France, the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy (1776), James Thoburn’s accounts of several travels to the same destinations and the Ottoman Empire (1787–98), and Ann Scafe’s Parisian journal (1790). Their journals not only contribute to current efforts to look beyond the aristocratic Grand Tour in accounts of eighteenth-century travel, but also constitute important evidence of mobility and life-writing