This volume covers a broad range of everyday private and public, touristic, commercial and fictional encounters between Britons and continental Europeans, in a variety of situations and places: moments that led to a meaningful exchange of opinions, practices, or concepts such as friendship or politeness. It argues that, taken together, travel accounts, commercial advice, letters, novels and philosophical works of the long eighteenth century, reveal the growing impact of British sociability on the sociable practices on the continent, and correspondingly, the convivial turn of the Enlightenment. In particular, the essays collected here discuss the ways and means - in conversations, through travel guides or literary works - by which readers and writers grappled with their cultural differences in the field of sociability. The first part deals with travellers, the second section with the spreading of various cultural practices, and the third with fictional encounters in philosophical dialogues and novels.

1. Introduction.- Part I. Conceptualizing Sociability: Travel and Tourism.- 2. The Cham on the Seine: Dr Johnson in Paris (and Mrs Thrale).- 3. Enlightened Fratriotism: Boswell in Corsica, Paoli in London.- 4. Communing with the Fictional Dead: Grave Tourism and the Sentimental Novel.- 5. Medicinal Sociability: British Bluestockings and the Continental Spa.- Part II. Practicing Sociability: Conflict, Commerce, and Cultural Transfer.- 6. Philip Thicknesse's Sociable Encounters in France: The Politics of Eccentricity.- 7. Elizabeth Craven, Private Theatricals, and Friedrich Schiller's The Robbers.- 8. The English can't waltz, never can, never will': The Politics of Waltzing in Romantic Britain.- 9. Sociable Encounters in Model Commercial Letters.- Part III. Fictionalizing Sociability: Conversation, Friendship and Philosophy.-10. Musick in Their Company': (Per)Forming Friendship and Early Enlightenment Sociability in Frances Brooke's The History of Lady JuliaMandeville.- 11. Robinson Crusoe: Speech, Conversation, Sociability.- 12. Reshaping the Leviathan: A Commonwealth Built around Sociable Encounters in Shaftesbury's Characteristicks.- 13. Hume and de Maistre - Sociable Fundamentalism.