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Jan Palmowski
guidebooks intended to “supply the traveler with all needful information, to point
out the most interesting places and the best way of reaching them, to render him
comparatively independent of the services of guides and others.” 4 They professionalized
travel for the middle classes, and rationalized – and in this way directed –
essential components of the tourist experience: the anticipation, perception, and
memory of travel. 5 This close interrelationship with middle-class tastes makes the
guidebook a unique and valuable historical source. Each of the twenty-five English
editions of the Baedeker on Switzerland published before 1914, or the eighteen
English editions of the Baedeker on Paris, presented an opportunity to enter into a
dialogue with its audience. Up to now, the precise nature of that dialogue has
remained relatively unclear. 6 This chapter will explore in greater detail the
relationship between the middle classes and the guidebook, and the ways in which
they influenced each other. This will suggest ways in which the travel guide was
an essential, and hitherto neglected, determinant of middle-class culture.
Intensive research in recent years has significantly increased our understanding
of the nature of the middle classes in a European and national context. 7 The greater
appreciation of the extent to which the middle classes left their imprint on politics
and society in late-nineteenth-century Europe has been concomitant with a
realization of their complexity and diffuseness that defies easy generalization. 8 The
middle classes are as difficult as ever to understand. Instead of adding to the
exhaustive research on “objective” factors of middle-class definition (such as
income, sociability, education), this chapter will use the guidebook to explore
actual communities of feeling that existed among the middle classes. This can
account for the spread of certain values and outlooks that bound the middle classes
together and added to a shared sense of culture. A focus on the most popular British
tourist destinations abroad will illuminate the guidebook’s popularization of “high”
culture and its implantation and prolongation of particular modes of thinking. This
chapter will reflect on the ways in which handbooks for travelers influenced social
trends, most notably relating to gender and class.
At the center of investigation are the relationship between middle classes of
Victorian and Edwardian Britain, and two of their own most lasting creations,
foreign mass travel and the “professional” guidebook. At the same time, foreign
travel and the guidebook necessarily involved encounters both with the host
culture, and, increasingly, the fellow travelers from other nations. Whereas in
Frederic Harrison’s younger days, three-quarters of the tourists to Switzerland
were British, he estimated in 1908 that the relative number of British tourists at
the most beautiful haunts had shrunk to one-fifth or even one-tenth of the total,
with German tourists very much in evidence. 9 This contribution responds to some
of the arguments raised by Rudy Koshar’s work on the guidebook and national
consciousness, 10 and considers questions about national identity in the ways travel
and the guidebook were experienced by the middle-class traveler.
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