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Jan Palmowski
and Shelley new levels of popularity. Images became internalized by the middle
classes, such as Byron’s impression of Mont Blanc as the “monarch of mountains,”
which is replicated not just in the guidebook, but in virtually every recorded
traveler’s sentiment.
In this way, the guidebook did everything to confirm and strengthen the
religiosity of its mid-Victorian readership. The Alps were a place to meet God, and
to encounter His power. This was not simply a consequence of romantic notions
of Switzerland. Travel and religion had been connected ever since Thomas Cook’s
first excursion in 1841, and this link continued through to the 1890s, when the
Evangelical Henry Lunn discovered the winter holiday. 38 Murray’s handbook
encouraged the Protestantism of its readers never crudely, but its admonitions to
enjoy the Alps spoke for themselves. 39 The Catlow sisters, for instance, made a
point of staying at the Weissenstein for more than just one day, refusing to leave
until they had been able to witness the sunset promised them by the Murray.
Eventually, they were rewarded with what was clearly, to them, a numinous
experience, full of mystery, magic, and wonder. In the distance, they could make
out the lakes of Neuchâtel and Bienne, which in their “misty loveliness” looked
“as though they hardly belonged to the earth, while the shadowy mountains
surrounding them were scarcely less ethereal.” 40 These were religious experiences,
personal encounters with God often recorded in travel journals through quotations
from the Bible. 41
Switzerland was usually perceived as a Protestant country in which God’s work
could be enjoyed by every individual, without distraction. To the guidebook and
its readership, the assumed kinship with Protestant Britain was strengthened further
by the lack of bureaucracy and military evident in public life, in marked contrast
to the Catholic French Empire and Austrian-occupied Venice. 42 Upon their arrival
in Dieppe, passengers were welcomed by two large crucifixes overlooking the
harbor, making unmistakable France’s religious flavour. In France, Victorian
Protestant middle-class travelers encountered Roman Catholicism, often for the
first time, through visiting the ornamental churches recommended by the guidebooks.
Indeed, visiting a Roman Catholic service became a tourist attraction in its
own right. 43 In Italy, the Papacy, grandeur, and decline were so closely intertwined
that Catholicism was a major theme in the Victorian’s fascination with the country
and its treasures. For this reason, the “Protestant” Murray had no hesitation to write
in highest praise about Roman Catholic churches, while the Baedeker delighted
in the sights of Paris, despite the anti-French leanings of the firm’s founder. 44 The
aim of the guidebook was necessarily to sell travel; its intrinsic professional
interest lay in praising the beauty of the sights it covered, lest the guidebook be
dispensable to its readership. Moreover, the buildings of Venice, Florence, and
Rome were highly relevant to the present, and their treasures of Gothic and
Renaissance, “Christian” and hedonist art, implied lessons for the observer which
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