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Travels with Baedeker
over the distinctly European Baedeker. By 1900, the Murray had failed to keep
pace with the Edwardian middle classes. These now identified with the Baedeker.
The close identification between the travel guidebook and its middle-class
readership makes tangible some of the salient features of the Victorian and
Edwardian middle classes. The guidebook’s popularization of “high” culture and
its prescription of attitudes and experiences were particularly effective because of
the great degree to which readers relied upon their guidebook in an otherwise
unfamiliar environment. Byron was revered at the Drachenfels, the sunset admired
at the Rigi Culm, and the torrent of the river Arve imagined because to so many
travelers there was no alternative source for guidance and information. Popular
travel and the guidebook affirmed a middle-class society ready and able to verify
John Ruskin’s meditations on morality and beauty on its travels, while the opening
up of the middle-class horizon of experience was a quintessential factor in the
popular impact of John Ruskin. Like many tour operators, Murray’s values and
assumptions were rooted in Victorian Protestantism. Through encouraging visits
to continental churches and religious art, guidebooks encouraged a confrontation
of the normally Protestant Victorian traveler with Roman Catholicism, urging him
or her to show reverence and courtesy. At the same time, Puritan disgust at the
morality of the French nobility in Murray’s description of sights such as the Palais
Royal, 100 or the romantic encouragement of an individual divine experience in the
Alps, did much to deepen the Protestant inclinations of the Victorian middle-class
traveler.
It is not possible in a single chapter to chart in detail the diversity of the
guidebook’s cultural impact on the Victorian middle classes. For instance, the way
in which guidebooks (and the Murray especially) commented in detail upon flora
and fauna, in contrast to relatively cursory observations about the host country’s
inhabitants, has to remain unexplored, even though this speaks volumes about the
growing Victorian appreciation of the countryside over urban life. Where the
guidebook undoubtedly did confirm current social trends was in the Victorian
awareness of class. Whereas the Murray or Baedeker became a mark of distinction
of the educated middle classes, a highly differentiated market for guidebooks
catered for the growing diversity of travelers and their needs. At the same time,
this chapter has shown how the guidebook could function as an important agent
of change, through an investigation of the relationship between the guidebook and
the lady traveler. It created a cultural and educational level playing field for
independent female travelers and thus made possible the development of an
entirely separate and distinctive sphere for women beyond previous conventions
and norms.
For Britain, there is no question that guidebook-assisted travel promoted
significantly the development of a greater sense of Britishness; an appreciation and
understanding of distinctive British nations through domestic travel, and a sense
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