Tourists: How the British Went Abroad to Find Themselves. Lucy Lethbridge (Bloomsbury, 2022)
An essay review of a great new book
Lucy Lethbridge has written a wonderful account of the evolution of the British tourist, from the early nineteenth century influx of British tourists to Paris following the end of the Napoleonic wars through to the package foreign holiday boom of the post-World War Two decades. As the sleeve note states: ‘From portable cameras to postcards and suntans, Tourists explores how tourism has reflected changing attitudes to modernity and how, from the grand hotel to the campsite, the foreign holiday exposes deep fears, hopes and even longings for home.’
The rise of the excursionists
Lethbridge’s account shows how society’s view of tourism reflects changes in the structure of social class. The rise of the industrial bourgeoisie in the 1800s created a new monied class of tourists. When they travelled abroad to Naples or Paris they were viewed as encroaching upon cultural riches viewed as something approaching a birth right by the aristocrats on their Grand Tours. Snobbery of the self-regarding traveler aimed at the tourist started there, and remains an enduring theme to this day.
The upstart tourists of the industrial class were labelled mere ‘excursionists’. In 1825 the Marquis of Normanby spotted ‘Jenkinsons and Tomkinson’s tumbling down the Alps in living avalanches’. The new middle classes visiting Italy were described disparagingly by Lady Lyttleton as looking ‘as though they’d been disgorged from the Margate Hoy’ – a reference to Londoners taking the paddle steamer up the Thames and round the coast to the iconic UK resort (recently favoured with its own TV series). The emergent tourist crowds were typically described in the most unflattering of terms: ‘swarms’, ‘herds’, ‘flocks’.
These sentiments feature in the literature of the period too. Charles Dickens’ book Little Dorrit features the Dorrits, a family whose rising fortunes enabled a trip to the Alps – something new and exciting for the family. But their presence was met with snooty regard from the old elite. These attitudes are of their time, but also of ours. Residents of the Isle of Thanet in East Kent will know that Margate, and similar well known UK resorts, still attract their share of disparagement.
The nineteenth century saw the establishment of other themes that have shaped discussion of tourism subsequently. In the 1860s, Charles Lever wrote for Blackwood’s Magazine about ‘continental excursionists’ who he saw as one day covering the world and ruining it. He compared tourists to ‘those inferior British textiles flooding the continental market and diminishing the standing of Great Britain abroad’. As Lethbridge notes, tourists were being ‘compared to mass produced items on an industrial conveyor belt’.
The comparison resonates with modern day prejudices. The presentation of leisure travellers of a certain kind as the inferior output of a country speaks to an unguarded and unqualified portrayal of mass tourists as lesser mortals. Today such sentiment would be likely to be expressed in a more guarded fashion, possibly couched in irony. It may well be coded in terms of a lack of ‘ethical’ or ‘sustainable’ tourism, the favoured prefixes for assumed morally superior alternatives to popular package holidays. That mass tourism threatens the world is good coin amongst some environmental activists, and the assumption of tourists as naive dupes of a rapacious industry is alive and well (not least, in my experience, in the universities). As travel writer Anthony Peregrine put it, ‘[d]isdaining tourists is the last permitted snobbery, a coded way of distancing oneself from the uncultured classes’.
From the classes to the masses
Modern industrial society established a traveling bourgeoisie who were looked down upon by the landed aristocracy. But as the industrial revolution developed it created the working class. Snobbery directed at bourgeois tourists – ‘mere excursionists’ - evolved into a more general denigration and regulatory impulse directed at their leisure pursuits.
Invalidating mass travel as crude and pointless for the uneducated and unrefined masses reflected and reinforced the assumed superiority and right to rule of the elites. The demands from below from movements like the Chartists, and events outside the UK such as the Paris Commune of 1874, along with the growth of trade unionism and class politics, fuelled a fear of the masses on the part of the upper classes. Tourism was just one small part of a culture war of sorts aimed at mass culture, designed to flatter elites who ruled without the consent of the large majority of those they governed. That the masses ought to know their place was the overriding sentiment.
In the second half of the nineteenth century the masses became leisure consumers. Economic growth and technological development enabled the working class to gain improvements in pay and free time. This led to the rise not only of tourism, but to commercial spectator sports (most notably football), music hall, and later, into the twentieth century, cinema. Whilst these activities were subject to the moral regulation of the Victorian elite, they also involved people’s dreams and desires, along with their need for rest and relaxation. Tourism was an important part of a mass culture, the latter later to be affirmed by Raymond Williams as representing the agency of ordinary people in the context of their lives.
The ‘anti-tourists’ of their day didn’t have things all their own way. Far from it. A progressive humanism featured in characterisations of tourists too. Thomas Cook - who for me emerges as something of a hero - upheld the humanity of his patrons of all social standings. He asked: ‘By what right [do the critics] assume them incapable of properly enjoying and intelligently appreciating wonders of nature, and the treasures of art, brought before them by travel?’ The self-appointed great and the good, he held, had no right to ‘look down on us with contempt’.
From today’s perspective Cook himself may be seen as a moraliser and hardly in the mould of fun seeking or relaxation. His call for ‘one cheer more for Teetotalism and Railwayism!’ would be unlikely to inspire today’s tourists. It was often bound up with a desire to ‘improve’ the working classes. This in part reflected a desire to improve them as workers and God-fearing subjects, rather than offer improvements per se. Yet Cook’s promotion of Christian temperance was far from unpopular amongst the masses, not least women charged with holding households together – it offered a more stable life as well as absolution from God. And he celebrated the conviviality of holidays, a sentiment we’d do well to revive today, having been denied these benefits throughout the recent pandemic.
Cook held to the humanist view that extending leisure and travel was a part of a common progress that should be shared. His defence of ‘travel for the millions’ (his phrase, adopted as the title of this excellent ‘tourism’ substack), based on the fruits of the latest technology, stands as an iconic statement of human progress and potential:
‘But what does it amount to’ ask some, ‘it neither fills the belly nor clothes the back’. Admitted; but it does infinitely more; it provides food for the mind; it contributes to the strength and enjoyment of the intellect; it helps pull men out of the mire and the corruption of old corrupt customs; it promotes a feeling of universal brotherhood; it accelerates the march of people, and virtue, and love; it also contributes to the health of the body by a relaxation from toil … A few years ago a ‘visit to a watering place’ was a luxury beyond the reach of a toiling artisan mechanic; his lot was to waste the midnight oil and his own Vital Energies in pandering to the vitiated tastes of the sons of fashion.
Where are such sentiments today ? I hope we have not lost sight of the optimistic, spirited humanism of the father of the package holiday in our cynical and fearful times.
‘cockneyism’ and ‘Albert Smithery’
Another figure who epitomised an optimism regarding the growth of tourism was Albert Smith, ‘in turn a hack, entertainer, traveller, mountaineer, man about town and eccentric dandy’. He brought his mid-nineteenth century intrepid travels back to the people through innovative ‘magic lantern’ shows. ‘His cheerful populism, with its familiar array of stock characters and pantomime archetypes, encouraged Smith’s audience to believe that the pleasures of foreign travel were not beyond their reach’. Smith is described as ‘a keen deflater of snobbery and pretension’. His comic sketches performed to the public included a ‘Natural History of Stuck Up People’. The popularity of his shows encouraged tourists to visit the Swiss Valleys, bringing with them, according to The Edinburgh Review, ‘cockneyism, the Albert Smithery, the fun, the frolic and the vulgarity’.
The need for speed, and the desire for slowness
I found the book’s coverage of speed fascinating. Greater speed is exemplary of modernity. The first railway, Stockton to Darlington, ran at 8mph. By 1830 steam trains travelled at 30mph and by 1850 they averaged 80 mph (which does highlight, perhaps the limited of progress since!).
Speed is also implicated in modernity’s discontents. Lethbridge writes that the need for speed and desire for mobility engendered a ‘an intense anxiety about the breaking of communities and local identity and the threat of outsiders: one local vicar worried that the coming of the railways would bring the end of ‘stories’’. Presumably life would flash past us, human contact and community would shrink, experience would narrow. These are themes rehearsed in different forms since, and that are part and parcel of a wider disillusionment with modern society today.
Growing mobility was also met with concerns it would generate idleness. Adan Bede, the narrator in George Elliot’s 1859 novel of the same name, feared that ‘the great work of the steam engine’ would only create ‘a vacuum for eager thought to rush in. Even idleness is eager now – eager for amusement; prone to excursion trains, art museums, periodical literature and exciting novels …’.
Ruskin had travelled through France and Italy at 5mph per day with his parents in a specially designed horse drawn carriage in the 1820s. He thought that trains ‘fostered moral lassitude and idleness: with passengers required only to sit there staring out of the window, rail travel promoted the antithesis of the questioning intelligence engendered by long, immersive travel’.
But the growth of rail travel established more optimistic ideas about the nature of movement too, such as how ‘change itself – change of scene, change of air, a jolting of old habits into new experiences – could cure both the sickness of the body and the sickness of the soul’.
Today advocates for slow living advocate a lack of speed as a counter to the dehumanising pace of modern life. Perhaps in a few decades we’ll be propelled at speeds of 700 miles per hour on Elon Musk’s hyperlink, and view today’s inter-city rail travel as quaint way to stay in touch with the countryside.
Nothing new under the sun
Lethbridge’s brilliant book makes plain that pretty much everything that has been thought and said about tourism in the last fifty years – broadly the period in which academics have taken an interest in it – was also in evidence from its origins. Even things that we may assume are very modern cultural shifts have their precedents in the nineteenth century.
Take the growth of niche markets in recent decades, as the consumer – or ‘new tourist’ as one marketing text has it - has sought to differentiate themselves from mass tastes, or seek tailor made holidays to reflect and cultivate their individuality. Recently Novelli and Robinson marked the recent developments in this direction in their book on Niche Tourism: an Introduction. But Lethbridge points out that tailored, niche experiences were on offer to the middle class from small tour operators in the 1930s. These tours were, according to Emmeline, a character in Elizabeth Bowen’s 1933 novel To The North, ‘not like Cook’s’. The niche was, or could be, a way of self-consciously differentiating one’s cultural status from the mass, then as now.
Or take the issue of authenticity – central to Lethbridge’s account. Post World War Two authors such as Dean MacCannell and Daniel Boorstin pondered authenticity, and plenty have followed suit. The apparent contradiction – that a search for selfhood shaped by a critique of modern, rational, regulated society inevitably takes advantage of the self-same modern society - is captured by Lethbridge when she writes: ‘The tourist industry is dependent on a technology that it also explicitly repudiates’. She reveals the search for authenticity to be a reaction to estrangement from modern, rational, technologically oriented society.
But Tourists also shows us that what is deemed authentic is fluid and contingent on the mood of the times. Take the railways for example. Lethbridge points out that in the nineteenth century rail travel was seen as somehow inauthentic, not quite ‘real’, compared to horse or oxen driven transport, or to travelling on foot. Today, of course, it is the railways that are associated with being authentic compared to the car and airplane. Rail journeys are more likely to be associated with contemplation and discovery, less with the ‘tourist bubble’ and environmental damage, these latter impacts now associated with road and air travel.
Commercialism, then and now
Today’s tourism stands accused of the commercialisation of culture. For example, from Barcelona to New Orleans, Malta to Edinburgh and Skye to Koh Samui, there is concern over the reshaping of communities into destinations through tourism real estate. As the late John Urry showed, the Tourist Gaze is not only about how we think about places, but it also shapes them, as the demands of tourists are met by a supply of buildings and facilities oriented around tourist’s wants and desires.
Again, Lethbridge reveals this as a theme throughout the history of modern tourism. She tells us that as Chamonix developed as a resort in the nineteenth century, John Ruskin described the process with disgust as ‘a consuming white leprosy of hotels and performers shops’. Other developing destinations, on the southern French coast for example, were subject to similar critiques.
The locals, too, were chastised for their willingness to exploit the commercial possibilities of tourism, ‘resolving the ancient consistency and pastoral simplicity of mountain life into the two irregular trades of inn-keeper and mendicant’ (mendicant meaning a beggar).
This mirrors the very current concern at the changes wrought to traditional ways of life by the growth of tourism in some of the academic and popular commentaries. It also implicitly raises the question of change – in objecting to the excesses of tourism in Victorian Britain, what was being objected to, and what exactly as Ruskin looking to preserve? We can ask the same questions today. Rural societies in the developing world – their environments and their cultures - are sometimes presented as in need of protection from a rapacious mass tourism industry. There is often a partial basis for this. But what are they offered in its stead beyond paltry and patronising development opportunities in the name of ‘sustainability’ or ‘ecotourism’?
The picturesque
We learn about the picturesque, ‘the sublime tamed and framed and taken home to hang on the wall’ described by The Reverend E William Gilpin in 1789 as ‘that kind of beauty that would look well in a picture’. The picturesque was, for others, twee and inauthentic. The framing and capturing of visual experience is integral to modern tourism through advertising, postcards, holiday snaps and ‘images’ searches on the internet.
Lethbridge points out that almost 200 years later French critic Roland Barthes found that ‘The Blue Guide hardly knows the existence of scenery except in the guise of the picturesque’, and that Boorstin’s notion of ‘pseudo-events’ is relevant too – the tame, modified version of reality, ‘made safe for looking at, not living in’. For the connoisseur, the picturesque was a ‘downmarket version of the more sophisticated sublime’.
The recurring themes certainly validate Mark Twain’s saying that ‘history doesn’t repeat itself but it often rhymes’.
Why you should read this book!
Whilst the book is excellent insight into all sorts of social changes, it is also a real cultural treat. Lethbridge captures the humour and humanity of tourism as it progresses, shaped by technology, fashion and wealth. It really is a window into how people lived, thought and thought of others. Tourism acts as a metaphor for the social world, a perspective that helps us understand both.
We discover the Journal of Decorative Arts 1909 view on travel’s influence on British living rooms: ‘Every portion of the habitable globe, from the arctic Regions to the Torrid zones, from the tea gardens of Tokyo to the Peak of Tenerife … has been ransacked to provide entertainment in the first place for the patrons of wallpaper showrooms’.
We find that travel reflected changing gender roles. Whereas travelling alone as a woman had been unthinkable, by 1857 Emily Lowe, exploring alone in Norway, wrote ‘The only use for a gentleman in travelling is to look after the luggage ….. and we care to have no luggage’.
But the key paradox at the heart of Lethbridge’s analysis is that, as she puts it , ‘Leisure had been timetabled’. Something we associate with search for freedom and individuality becomes subject to the same rationalising tendencies and the cash nexus, indistinguishable from modernity at large. Yet it is also the terrain of cultural change, desire and progress. Holidays are close to our hearts, places where memories are made and life lived. The individuals involved and their desires are sometimes neglected, written out in favour of schemas that lack the human touch. Lethbridge does the opposite, and that makes it a great read.
This is a terrific book, packed with human stories that tell a much wider story. If you want to recapture some of the joy of tourism in our fearful times, this is a book for you.
Jim Butcher, April 2023