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Travels Travels with with Baedeker Baedeker – – The
The
Guidebook Guidebook and and the the Middle Middle Classes Classes in
in
Victorian Victorian and and Edwardian Edwardian Britain
Britain
Jan Palmowski
What literary fame equals John Murray’s? What portmanteau, with two
shirts and a nightcap, hasn’t got one Handbook? . . . Does he look upon
a building, a statue, a picture, an old cabinet, or a manuscript, with
whose eyes does he see it? With John Murray’s, to be sure!
I cannot conceive anything more frightful than the sudden appearance
of a work which should contradict everything in the Handbook . . . if
we awoke one morning to hear that the “Continent” was no longer the
Continent we have been accustomed to believe it, what a terrific shock
it would prove. 1
This sketch by Charles Lever reflects a growing phenomenon of the Victorian and
Edwardian era, the “middle classification” of travel. No longer an exclusive
prerogative of moneyed elites willing to spend months or even years on the “Grand
Tour” of Europe, travel became more widespread as better turnpikes, railway
travel, and steamboats greatly reduced the burdens of travel with regard to price,
comfort, and length. In the early 1850s, Charles Dickens marveled at the speed
and comfort with which the express train whisked him to Paris. “I feel as if I were
enchanted or bewitched. It is barely eight o’clock yet . . . And yet this morning –
I’ll think of it in a warm-bath.” “When can it have been that I left home? When
was it that I paid ‘through to Paris’ at London Bridge, and discharged myself of
all responsibility . . .? It seems to have been ages ago.” 2 In a more sophisticated
manner than Lever, Charles Dickens, too, was acutely aware of the connection
between the guidebook and middle-class travel. Although fiercely hostile to the
English traveler’s slavish fixation on the guidebook whenever abroad, Dickens
found his Murray’s indispensable for his own continental journeys. 3
Murray’s handbooks for travelers, published from 1836, were the first in a new
generation of guidebooks responding to the growth in middle-class travel. These
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