Untitled

Jan Palmowski
World War I, he sold the series on to James and Findlay Muirhead, until the war
the English editors of the Baedeker’s guides, who published a new series of
guidebooks in 1918 as the “Blue Guides.” 95
There are important commercial and technological reasons for Baedeker’s
success. The Baedeker was famous for the quality of its maps. It gained a
reputation for being more reliable for the European continent, its own “backyard.”
96 Even though the different language editions were in some areas adapted
to the specific national markets, translating the guidebook into a number
of languages achieved important economies of scale which made it possible for
the Baedeker to be sold much more cheaply than the Murray. In the 1860s,
Baedeker’s English guidebook to Switzerland cost 5s. 6d. compared to 9s. for the
Murray. 97 Murray’s handbooks tended to be longer, bulkier, and less easy to carry
around. Even though Murray was endorsed by Gaze and Ball, Baedeker was
rigorously promoted by the market leader in travel provisions, Thomas Cook,
not only in Cook’s Guides, but also in his brochures and magazines. 98 These
arguments go a long way to explaining why the Baedeker was more successful
commercially, but they do not tell the whole story. In particular, they do not reveal
why the Murray, which had been such a cultural icon despite its inferior maps and
other shortcomings in the 1860s, had passed on that status to the Baedeker by
1900. In an age of mass travel, one might have expected that a high price and
comprehensiveness would have been welcomed by a middle-class clientele eager
to distinguish itself from the growing mass of budget travelers.
The key to the Murray’s decline vis-à-vis the Baedeker towards the end of the
century was the different values which the competitors presented to their readership.
In its Handbook to Paris, for instance, Murray commended French food, but
hastened to add that “there is perhaps no public dining establishment in Paris which
can produce a first-rate dinner equal to that of a good London club.” By contrast,
Baedeker left no doubt that, “Paris is indisputably the cradle of high culinary art.”
There was no mention anywhere in the Murray of the city’s theaters, whereas the
Baedeker urged its readership to visit at least some of the theaters it listed as a
characteristic aspect of Parisian life. 99 Together with the impressions gained earlier
from a comparison of the guidebooks to northern Italy and Switzerland, it is
difficult to escape the conclusion that it is precisely because the Murray was so
patronizingly familiar in its assumptions and values that the middle classes in
Britain came to prefer the Baedeker. In the 1860s, continental travel was still a
relatively new phenomenon for the British middle classes, and it was all the more
important to have a guidebook which reassured and reaffirmed in its familiarity.
By 1900, foreign travel had ceased to be extraordinary, and the middle classes
traveled abroad to experience something different. Despite their efforts to keep up
with their readership, in the end Murray’s handbooks could not deny their origins.
In the 1860s, the Murray’s unadulterated English flavor had been a clear advantage
120