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Travels with Baedeker
their own after marriage, this experience of independence contributed to the
changing role of women and their greater freedom of maneuver within the family
before 1914. 71
If the guidebook became an emancipatory tool with regard to gender, the
opposite was true with regard to class. This is surprising at first glance. One of the
revolutionary aspects of travel in the railway age was, after all, that in theory it
leveled class distinctions, as all classes boarded the same trains, from the same
platforms, going to the same destinations. 72 It is true that continental travel was
perceived to be too expensive and time-consuming for the British working
classes. 73 Yet with growing numbers of travelers overseas, the idea of the European
continent being a preserve of the middle classes became more of an illusion than
a reality. In the early 1870s, the cumbersome passage from Newhaven and Dieppe,
which would, depending on the tide, take between eighteen and twenty-four hours
to complete, 74 thrived on its low cost, as it offered travel in third class which
reduced the price for the cheapest return from London to Paris to 30s. (compared
to 75s. via Folkestone). Just as the London Great Exhibition had made the
experience of domestic travel truly popular throughout society, the Paris Exhibitions
exposed new social groups to the continent, extending the social scale of
travelers downwards. For the 1867 Great Exhibition in Paris, the number of cross-
Channel passengers increased by 50 percent, from 295,000 (1866) to 457,000
(1867), before it fell to 305,000 in 1868. 75 Around 10,000 traveled under the
auspices of Thomas Cook, whose cheapest ticket made it possible to travel from
London to Paris, with four days there including accommodation, meals, and
entrance fees, for 36s. 76 For the Great Exhibition in 1878 Cook sold 75,000 tickets
between London and Paris, and in 1889 he arranged the sale of 200,000 tickets.
Each time, it was the cheap passage from Newhaven and Dieppe which recorded
the steepest rise in passengers. 77
As the nineteenth century drew to a close, travel became cheaper, in relative
and absolute terms. The commencement of Cook’s tours to the European continent
coincided with the growth of real incomes of the middle classes from the 1860s,
which was especially pronounced from the 1880s. 78 At the same time, the travel
industry became responsive to new groups. In 1900, Henry Lunn offered a week’s
trip to the Paris Exhibition for five and a half guineas, a nine-day trip to Lucerne
for £6 6s., and an eighteen-days’ tour through Switzerland for £11 5s. 6d. 79
Thomas Cook could offer a special rate to Switzerland for one week at five guineas
for literary and other societies, polytechnics, and schoolteachers. In fact, cross-
Channel travel was barely more expensive than vacationing in England. In 1899,
Thomas Cook offered short trips to Calais and Boulogne including three nights’
accommodation and full board for £2 2s., while the cheapest five-day excursion
from London within England, to Brighton, cost £2 2s. 6d. 80 In this way, a small
number of foreign resorts became refuges no longer exclusively for the British
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