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Travels with Baedeker
was much more apt than the Baedeker with thirty pages devoted to the museum in
the 1873 edition. 89 These popular guides were only partly about what to see – Gaze
devoted less than one-quarter of his guide to the actual sights of Paris – and were
much more prescriptive in content, and simple in layout, than Baedeker and
Murray: Gaze told his readers not just when to get up in the morning, but also what
to eat where and at what time. 90
The opening up of foreign travel to the petty bourgeoisie and the “respectable”
working classes did not weaken the link between the Baedeker or Murray and its
educated middle-class readership. In fact, it strengthened it. As educational tours
or trips to the Palestine were directed at a middle class eager to distinguish and
justify itself through culture, Baedeker and Murray came to act as further signposts
to this section of the population. Having been scorned as facilitators of popular
travel in the mid-Victorian period, in Edwardian England they were appreciated
as works of education and learning. In 1850, The Times warned that it was
Murray’s handbook which enabled “the veriest cockney, the greenest school-boy,
and the meekest country clergyman” to travel to the European continent. 91 By
1889, William Coolidge, one of England’s greatest Alpinists, urged for a thorough
revision of the Murray as the only book that gave justice to Switzerland’s culture
and heritage, among the glut of popular guidebooks swamping the market. 92
Guidebooks in their diversity reflected the growing class differentiation among
British travelers abroad, and in turn strengthened it. By 1900, the Baedeker had
become indispensable to the middle-class traveler eager to emphasize his or her
cultural credibility. The communion between guidebook and readership had
become closer than ever before.
This raises a final question, about the relationship between the Murray and the
Baedeker. Whereas the two guidebooks first established themselves in their
separate markets, from the 1860s Baedeker had his guidebooks translated into
English and thus directly competed with Murray for the same readership. As
shown earlier, in the 1860s the Murray more than held its own against its German
rival, both in quantitative (as measured by the number of editions) and in
qualitative terms – Murray was the guidebook which continued to be synonymous
with English middle-class travel. 93 New editions of Murray’s guide to Switzerland
appeared regularly until the publication of the sixteenth edition in 1879. Thereafter,
it sold with greater difficulty, and in 1891, W.A.B. Coolidge stood by his word
and supervised thorough revisions of the eighteenth edition. This failed to revive
sales, and the nineteenth edition did not appear until 1904. By 1851, John Murray
had made a profit of £10,000 on his handbooks. In the 1880s, as Baedeker became
acknowledged as the “prince of guide-book makers,” 94 Murray’s handbooks had
difficulties breaking even, and in 1901 almost the entire series was sold to Edward
Standford, a publisher of low-budget guidebooks, for £2,000. Standford’s reissue
of many of the titles was not graced with more success, and after the outbreak of
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