A Room with a View - E. M. Forster [3]
1939 World War II begins.
1941 Virginia Woolf drowns herself.
1943 Lionel Trilling’s seminal work on Forster, E. M. Forster: A Study, is published.
1945 Forster’s mother dies, and he makes his final trip to India. George Orwell’s Animal Farm appears.
1948 T. S. Eliot receives the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1950 Bertrand Russell receives the Nobel Prize for Literature.
1951 Forster publishes Two Cheers for Democracy and coauthors, with Eric Crozier, the libretto for Benjamin Britten’s opera Billy Budd, based on Herman Melville’s novel.
1953 Queen Elizabeth II awards Forster membership in the Order of Companions of Honour. Four years earlier he had declined a knighthood.
1960 An opponent of censorship throughout his life, Forster speaks at the obscenity trial concerning D. H. Lawrence’s 1928 novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover.
1970 E. M. Forster dies in Coventry on June 7.
1972 Forster’s unpublished stories and essays are published in Albergo Empedocle and Other Writings.
Introduction
If you were a young woman, from a relatively well-off family, coming of age in Britain at the turn of the twentieth century, you might think of passing a month or two in Italy, to prepare yourself for a life in polished society by learning a little something about Italian art. You would select a companion, as it would be neither convenient nor seemly to travel alone. An older, unmarried cousin would serve nicely as chaperone. And you would buy a guidebook, either Murray’s or Baedeker’s, the two most popular travel series of the day. Let’s say you opt for Baedeker. You would find, in your new Baedeker, suggestions for itineraries of varying durations, as well as hotels and pensions recommended in each city on your chosen agenda, and you would write to these lodgings to engage rooms. “Passports,” Baedeker informs you, “though not required in Italy, are occasionally useful”—to pick up a registered letter, for example—and for 2 shillings this document is yours, with an added fee if you obtain it through a travel agent such as Thomas Cook. You were planning to visit Cook’s offices anyway, since his coupons, redeemable for food and lodging at many foreign hotels, will no doubt come in handy as well. These preparations made, you pack your suitcase with clothing fit for the season (consulting Baedeker, of course, for an analysis of the Mediterranean climate) and embark, setting off from London for the boat train to Paris, and from there boarding another train that crosses the Alps. Before you arrive in Turin you mean to have mastered the major points of Professor Anton Springer’s “Historical Sketch of Italian Art” helpfully provided in Baedeker’s introduction, but you find yourself distracted from study by the passing scenery and the prospect of adventures to come. Who knows (to borrow a line from an E. M. Forster novel) but that you might be transfigured by Italy? It had happened to the Goths.
Nearly a century has passed since Forster sent Miss Lucy Honeychurch and her spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, on their memorable trip to Italy, the trip that makes up the first half of A Room with a View. We now have many more travel guides to choose from, as well as faster modes of transportation and more stringent methods of identification (passports are most definitely required). But Baedeker is still in print, and the boat train still running, and in essence Forster’s tourists are still familiar to anyone who has ever taken guidebook in hand and set off for foreign shores.
What is surprising, in fact, is how little tourism has changed over the past hundred years, once it made the leap from a privileged activity to a mass pursuit. Dean MacCannell, in his classic study of tourism, suggests a neat sociological evolution of travel: “What begins as the proper activity of the hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British