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Travels with Baedeker
readership’s cultural assumptions. At the same time, it created travel customs (not
least the reliance on the Baedeker itself) which united the European middle classes
in their experience of foreign travel and culture. Baedeker allowed for and
encouraged national distinctiveness while, at the same time, connecting the British
middle classes firmly to continental European culture.
Baedeker’s adoption by the Edwardian middle classes is a reminder that it is
important to arrive at a more complex understanding of national and cultural
identities, in which there is room for different layers of experience and sentiment.
By 1900, the Baedeker had become an essential component of the cultural canon
of the British middle classes. Rejecting the insularity epitomized by the Murray,
they wanted to experience travel in what they perceived to be a rigorous, continental,
and uncompromisingly professional way. The guidebook’s function as a
litmus test for middle-class sensibilities suggests that, by the eve of World War I,
the British middle classes identified much more closely with the European
continent in outlook and culture than ever before. It was precisely this awareness
of a common European heritage which contributed to the readiness of so many
members of the middle classes to engage in a war in which this heritage seemed
threatened.
Notes
1. [Charles Lever], Arthur O’Leary: His Wanderings and Ponderings in Many Lands
(London, 1844), vol. 1, pp. 86–7.
2. Charles Dickens, “A Flight,” in Charles Dickens, The Uncommercial Traveler and
Reprinted Pieces etc. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1958), pp. 482–3.
3. Tore Rem, “Little Dorrit, Pictures from Italy, and John Bull,” in Anny Sadrin (ed.),
Dickens, Europe and the New Worlds (London: Macmillan, 1999), pp. 131–45; Andrew
Sanders, “The Dickens World,” in Michael Cotsell (ed.), English Literature and the Wider
World, vol. 3: Creditable Warriors 1830–1876 (London: Ashfield, 1990), pp. 131–42.
4. This quotation is taken from K. Baedeker, Switzerland and the Adjacent Portions of
Italy, Savoy, and the Tyrol, 15th edn (Leipzig, 1893), p. v; Cotsell, Creditable Warriors,
p. 12.
5. John Urry, The Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies (London:
Sage, 1990), p. 3.
6. Burkhart Lauterbach, “Baedeker und andere Reiseführer: Eine Problemskizze,”
Zeitschrift für Volkskunde 85 (1989), pp. 206–36.
7. J. Barry, “The Making of the Middle Class?” Past and Present 145 (1995), pp. 200–
1; R.J. Morris, Class, Sect and Party: The Making of the British Middle Class 1820–1850
(Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1990); W.D. Rubinstein, “The Size and
Distribution of the English Middle Classes in 1860,” Historical Research 61 (1988), pp.
123