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If It’s 1815, This Must Be Belgium: The Origins of the Modern Travel Guide Piet

If It’s 1815, This Must Be Belgium: The Origins of the Modern Travel Guide Pieter François Book History, Volume 15, 2012, pp. 71-92 (Article) Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press DOI: 10.1353/bh.2012.0000 For additional information about this article Access provided by Princeton University (17 Feb 2014 13:00 GMT) http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/bh/summary/v015/15.francois.html If It’s 1815, This Must Be Belgium ! The Origins of the Modern Travel Guide Pieter François During the late interval of Peace, as the man of pleasure, or of com- mercial enterprise, was daily invited to the Continent, complaints were frequent, notwithstanding a profusion of Tours and Travels, that a Comprehensive Guide, adapted to existing circumstances, was still wanting! Without the least intention to depreciate the works of former writers, it must be acknowledged that such altera- tions have taken place, that nothing hitherto published, will bear the character of a COMPLETE GUIDE to any Traveller of the pres- ent day. (Charles Campbell, 1815)1 The writer of this volume having experienced, as every Englishman visiting the Continent must have done, the want of any tolerable English Guide Book for Europe North of the Alps, was induced, partly for his own amusement, partly to assist his friends going abroad, to make copious notes of all that he thought worth ob- servation, and of the best modes of travelling and seeing things to advantage. (John Murray, 1836)2 In the second quotation, from the ﬁrst Hand-Book for Travellers on the Continent, John Murray III lamented the lack of a decent English guide- book on the Continent. With his own guide, Murray hoped to change this. In the ﬁrst quotation, from a much less famous travel book from 1815, the author, Charles Campbell, made a very similar complaint. He, too, admitted that many guides, accounts, journals, and letters based on travel experiences had been published, yet twenty-one years before Murray, he judged none of them to be satisfactory, none of them written with the traveler in mind. Protests about inadequate guidebooks as a reason to publish one’s own guidebook are as old as the genre itself. Even Thomas Nugent, often seen as one of founding fathers of the genre of Grand Tour manuals, made a similar Book History 72 complaint in his famous The Grand Tour of 1749.3 Despite the perennial nature of these complaints, the judgment of John Murray has been trusted at face value by scholars, while similar statements, like Charles Campbell’s, have been ignored.4 This difference in attention ﬁts neatly into a larger his- toriographical periodization. Historians of travel and literary scholars tend to emphasize the importance of the ﬁrst decades after 1836, the year Mur- ray published his ﬁrst guidebook, in explaining the emergence of “modern travel.” For the travel historian Marjorie Morgan, for example, the begin- ning of the “traveling age” coincided with the start of the Victorian era. “Before the mid-nineteenth century,” she claims, “only a percentage of the aristocratic elite set their sights beyond the British Isles when they formu- lated travel plans.”5 Within this framework, John Murray, Karl Baedeker, and Thomas Cook become the key ﬁgures of the mid-nineteenth-century boom in travel,6 whereas guidebooks written in the period 1815–1836 are either ignored or judged to be closer to older eighteenth-century Grand Tour manuals and therefore less innovative.7 Morgan insists that “before Mur- ray’s handbooks appeared, individual authors wrote one- or two-volume guides based on their travels, but no one attempted to produce a series me- thodically covering whole countries and continents.”8 This article challenges this interpretation by analyzing a large group of little-known and unknown guidebooks published immediately after the opening up of the Continent to British travelers in 1815, or when Murray was setting up his own series. My geographical focus is Belgium—which was nearby, accessible, cheap, and often the ﬁrst destination for new groups of British travelers throughout the nineteenth century.9 An analysis of Brit- ish travel to Belgium is therefore well placed to point out new developments in the travel industry, and innovations in guidebooks were often ﬁrst tried out for the Belgian market. Furthermore, this approach broadens the usual focus on Italy, Switzerland, Paris, and the Rhine in the historiography of nineteenth-century travel. Many interlocking reasons help explain why scholars have largely over- looked travel guides before 1836. First, the well-known success stories of Murray, Baedeker, Cook, and their commercial empires have tempted histo- rians to project this success backward, to the early stages of their careers. As a result, competitors and rival guidebooks from those early years, although providing the immediate context in which Murray and Baedeker launched their series, have received surprisingly little attention. Second, the concepts of “travel guide” and “travel account,” the most basic categories of histori- ans of travel and literary scholars, are better deﬁned and more easily distin- If It’s 1815, This Must Be Belgium 73 guishable from each other after 1836 than for the period 1815–1836.10 This allows scholars to ask the crucial questions of how guidebooks inﬂuenced and shaped the travel experience and, in turn, how guidebooks reﬂected and incorporated changes in the world of travel. It is more difﬁcult to address these questions for the period 1815–1836, when the distinction between travel accounts and travel guides was more blurred. Third, studying and explaining travel after 1836 has the advantage that all the elements usu- ally associated with modern travel were in place: the railway, the middle- class traveler, and a recognizable and standardized travel industry. But im- mediately after 1836, these elements were often only present in embryonic form;11 assuming the existence of a smoothly running touristic world can therefore be misleading. This warning is even more valid for the period 1815–1836, when these elements were slowly and unevenly introduced into an older travel culture. Fourth, the general emphasis on guidebooks after 1836 ﬁts well with the “national” historiography. Guidebooks are present- ed as excellent sources for the study of the “national” and especially for the analysis of intercultural perceptions and stereotypes, an approach partly justiﬁed by the degree to which English guidebooks and accounts copied from each other.12 Shifting the focus to the lesser-known guidebooks before 1836 reveals, however, a more transnational process of information gath- ering. These guidebooks were largely compiled from foreign publications (guidebooks, histories, topographies, novels, published statistics) and most often acknowledged these sources openly.13 The partly foreign origin of many long-repeated stereotypes therefore makes the use of guidebooks for the study of intercultural stereotypes more complex than is often assumed. In contrast with later publications, John Murray himself, for example, had no problem in acknowledging that his ﬁrst guidebook “has not, indeed, much pretension to novelty, and a great part of the information contained in it is, of course, derived from books, modiﬁed by actual observations. But many of the works consulted are in foreign languages, and not easily acces- sible to English readers.”14 In making this claim, he was perfectly in tune with his contemporary competitors. By analyzing protomodern British guidebooks on Belgium from the pe- riod 1815–1836 and the ﬂourishing guidebook market when Murray was establishing his series during the second half of the 1830s and 1840s, this ar- ticle illustrates a more gradual understanding of the “birth” of the modern travel guide. Some of the innovations usually ascribed to Murray, like the impersonal style of his travel guides and the breaking up of the journey in manageable blocks, can in fact be pushed backward. In order to capture the Book History 74 complexities of travel in this period, this article focuses on both new styles of traveling and on the tenacity and vibrancy of the older travel culture. British Travelers to Belgium Both contemporaries and historians noticed the rise in the number of British travelers to the Continent from 1814 and especially from 1815 onward.15 In the weeks immediately following the Battle of Waterloo, large numbers of travelers crossed the English Channel, and a visit to the battleﬁeld was quickly incorporated into the tourist route.16 However, already in 1814, MP Richard Boyle Bernard noticed “a late increase in numbers of travellers.”17 This observation soon assumed the character of a stereotype based on a strong class bias. As Pryse Gordon protested: A large proportion of these Tourists have not the smallest taste for the beauties of nature or the works of art, and return to their ﬁre- sides with less real knowledge than the monkey in the fable. One frequently encounters these dull plodding travellers in the treck- schuyts and steam boats, steering their way southwards, at a certain season, like birds of passage, without knowing a word of the conti- nental languages, and with no more knowledge of the topography, history, and manners, of the places through which they pass, [than] they can pick out of their guide books.18 Recognizing the stereotype, scholars have questioned the timing and magnitude of this ﬂood of travelers. James Buzard, for example, claims that a relatively small rise in numbers resulted in a much stronger and exagger- ated cultural reaction of the established traveler against the perceived tide uploads/Geographie/ if-it-x27-s-1815-this-must-be-belgium-the-origins-of-the-modern-travel-guide.pdf