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Travels with Baedeker
Large-scale travel was a Victorian phenomenon, participated in by virtually all
sectors of urban society. As British cities expanded, their populations sought refuge
on holidays in nearby resorts. The number of passengers transported from London
to Margate and Ramsgate by the Margate Pier and Harbour Company rose from
17,000 in 1812–13 to 105,625 in 1835, after which the railways made access to these
resorts even easier. 11 In the season of 1879, each day an average of 40,000 excursionists
swamped Blackpool, which was already catering for 70,000 visitors on
longer stays. 12 For the middle classes eager to take refuge from the traveling hordes
so mercilessly caricatured in contemporary sketches, traveling abroad became
increasingly de rigueur.
Even before the advent of the railway, greater speed in travel resulted in large
increases of passengers: reflecting improvements in navigation from England to
France, the journey from Boulogne to Paris, which took 35 hours to complete in
1814, took but 16 hours in 1848. 13 By 1840, around 87,000 passages (equivalent
to 43,500 return trips) between Britain and the European continent were recorded.
Following the completion of the railway link from London and Paris to the coast,
the number of cross-Channel passages recorded rose to 165,000 in 1850, 238,264
in 1860, and 344,719 in 1869. Up to 80 percent of these journeys were undertaken
by British passengers. 14 Many of these British passengers consisted of British
residents in France or their visitors; as early as the 1840s, there were 66,000 British
residents in France, with regular English church services being held in 25 towns. 15
A further group comprised commercial travelers, those going to Paris or other parts
of Europe on business. This chapter focuses on a third group of travelers,
vacationers, those who went abroad for any length of time, from a couple of days
to several months. These formed the market for tourist guidebooks. It is impossible
to determine accurately the relative size of these groups, but the significant
increase from the 1840s in seasonal travel over the summer months suggests
strongly that the lion’s share of the growth of travel in Victorian and Edwardian
Britain was the result of vacation travel. Whereas at the beginning of Victoria’s
reign (1837), 33 percent of annual travel through Dover occurred in summer (July
to September) compared to 19.6 percent for the three winter months, by 1865, 40.5
percent of annual travel through Calais took place in summer, compared to the 15.4
percent using this route from December to February. 16 It is only with the growth
of winter vacationing from the 1880s that the proportional number of passengers
passing through the Channel ports in the winter months increased. 17
The growth of vacationers during the 1850s and 1860s is directly reflected in
the proliferation of guidebooks. After the publication of the first edition of
Murray’s guidebook to Switzerland in 1838, the sixteenth edition was published
in 1879. In that year, Karl Baedeker published the eighth English edition of his
guidebook to Switzerland, which followed the publication of his seventeenth
German edition on Switzerland two years earlier. These two guidebooks had very
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