• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 4062 0

‘gentleman’), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist)” (The Tourist, p. 5; MacCannell’s emphasis; see “For Further Reading”). That final transition came to pass in the nineteenth century, thanks to a number of factors conducive to middle-class travel. It was a time of relative peace and overall economic prosperity in England and the Continent. Advances in transportation—railways and steamers—brought cities and continents closer together, and the consolidation of Britain’s imperial power made exotic locations like India, Egypt, and South Africa more accessible to English speakers, while fiction and nonfiction set in those regions brought them into the English imagination. Novels championed the near abroad as well: As early as 1806, Lady Morgan’s immensely popular romance The Wild Irish Girl advertised the attractions of Ireland (cultural, geological, and female), while Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and other writings romanticized the Scottish highlands and the valor of its people. As the century wore on, many best-selling writers published accounts of their own travels: Charles Dickens went to Italy (he carried Murray’s guidebook); the indefatigable Anthony Trollope went to Australia and New Zealand, among numerous other countries. Back home, the Great Exhibition of 1851, with displays representing countries from Russia to the West Indies, attracted some 6 million visitors to London and filled their heads with visions of what lay beyond England’s shores, while Charles Darwin’s voyages demonstrated the potential scientific value of geographical exploration. Progress was a watch-word of the Victorian era, and travel, both foreign and domestic, seemed to go hand in hand with it.

But perhaps a more subtle factor contributing to the rise of mass tourism was the growing sense of individual liberty and agency among England’s non-aristocratic classes. Three successive Reform Acts, beginning in 1832, extended the franchise so that by 1884 most workingmen and agricultural laborers had gained the right to vote. (The women’s vote would follow in 1918.) The Reform Acts also allowed for more fairly apportioned parliamentary representation, while other legislation supported education for children and began to institute factory reform, improving workplace conditions and approving measures for the protection of workers. With all these advances came an increasing sense of empowerment among the non-aristocratic classes, and consequently a heightened sense of opportunity for further advancement. The Grand Tour had been an institution among aristocrats, in which men and women of privilege traveled through Europe as if it were a finishing school, absorbing its art, culture, and languages at their leisure, the better to enrich themselves and English society on their return. Why should the professional classes, and someday maybe even working-class men and women, not engage in this pursuit as well?

Engage in it they did, coming in droves from England and from America. Here is Mark Twain chronicling the Anglo-American zeitgeist in the summer of 1867 as he prepares for a pleasure cruise scheduled to hit all the hot spots in Europe and the Mediterranean:

During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement. Everybody was going to Europe—I, too, was going to Europe. Everybody was going to the famous Paris Exposition—I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition. The steamship lines were carrying Americans out of the various ports of the country at the rate of four or five thousand a week in the aggregate. If I met a dozen individuals during that month who were not going to Europe shortly, I have no distinct remembrance of it now (The Innocents Abroad, p. 27).

But, as Twain’s satirical travelogue goes on to demonstrate, no sooner did tourists emerge as a distinct species than they were subject to ridicule as vulgar blots on whatever landscape they happened to visit. (That attitude, too, has not changed much in the past century.) And no sooner had tourists