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By Root 4070 0

begun to penetrate en masse the towns and villages of Europe and Asia than their successors were inspired to root out places that had not yet been desecrated by tourists’ footsteps, in a self-perpetuating quest for authentic experience, the true Italy, the true India, and so on. The great invention of pioneering British travel agent Thomas Cook was the group excursion—he led his first in 1841 and ultimately escorted parties numbering in the hundreds—but the paths Cook’s tourists tracked through France and Switzerland, Egypt and Palestine, India and Australia, became precisely the paths that other tourists sought to avoid. We find the operative phrase, so common in our contemporary travel lexicon, as early as 1905 in Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread: “In a place like this,” writes the widowed Lilia from the small Italian town she is visiting, “one really does feel in the heart of things, and off the beaten track.”

Still, the beaten track continued to suffice for many, including Lucy Honeychurch, the young heroine of A Room with a View. Lucy is a satisfied adherent to Baedeker, nor is she too self-conscious to claim the label of “tourist” when asked by the resident Anglican chaplain, Mr. Eager, what her purpose is in visiting Italy. A Room with a View is a short book, in which characterization necessarily happens quickly, and part of the reason tourism is such an important subject in any discussion of the novel is that the characters in Lucy’s circle in Florence are defined by their attitudes toward it. In this case, the word elicits an illuminating diatribe: “I quite agree,” said Miss Lavish, who had several times tried to interrupt his mordant wit. “The narrowness and superficiality of the Anglo-Saxon tourist is nothing less than a menace” (p. 60).

“Oh, indeed,” said Mr. Eager. “Are you indeed? If you will not think me rude, we residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little—handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get ‘done’ or ‘through’ and go on somewhere else. The result is, they mix up towns, rivers, palaces in one inextricable whirl. You know the American girl in Punch who says: ‘Say, poppa, what did we see at Rome?’ And the father replies: ‘Why, guess Rome was the place where we saw the yaller dog.’ There’s traveling for you. Ha! ha! ha!”

There we have Mr. Eager, the pompous expatriate, and Miss Lavish, novelist and self-proclaimed seeker of Italy’s essence, who wants to “emancipate” Lucy from Baedeker (p. 19) and who seems not to realize that her protests against tourists and the typical tourist experience are themselves well-traveled objections, stale and predictable. We know the Miss Alans, too, the elderly spinsters who come abroad for the climate but bring England with them, in their attitudes, their prejudices, and their stash of digestive biscuits. And we recognize Mr. Beebe, the gentleman clergyman and affable observer, able to cross social boundaries with ease.

Mr. Beebe’s skill as mediator is introduced in the novel’s opening pages, but the communication gap he bridges is not where we might expect to find it, between the Italians and the English. Rather, it occurs within England, dividing people who represent different classes and thus hold different points of view. The deal he brokers is the all-important agreement between Miss Bartlett and Mr. Emerson in which Mr. Emerson and his son, George, give up their south-facing rooms so that Lucy and Charlotte might have a view of the Arno. A third party is necessary in these negotiations only because Mr. Emerson has offered the trade in a tactless sort of way: outright, over the Pension Bertolini dinner table, with more vigor than is suitable to express toward two ladies with whom he is not yet acquainted. Charlotte, who subscribes to the rule of social niceties, finds the Emersons “ill-bred” (p. 8); Mr. Emerson, who subscribes to the Transcendental philosophy of his namesake,