Victorians and Edwardians Abroad: The Beginning of the Modern Holiday

191 Pages·2016·11.54 MB·English

by  Neil Matthews

To my mother

Contents
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Introduction
Chapter 2 The Birth of the Polytechnic
Chapter 3 Early Poly Travels and the Origins of the PTA
Chapter 4 The Business of Touring
Chapter 5 The Outward Journey
Chapter 6 Being There: What the Tourists Did
Chapter 7 Meeting Jean le Foreigner: What the Tourists Thought
Chapter 8 The Purpose of Holidays: A Modern Note?
Chapter 9 Conclusion: Independence and War
Chapter 10 Afterword
A Note About Money
Selected Bibliography
Plates
Acknowledgements
Thanks are due to the University of Westminster and to the Quintin Hogg Trust
for giving me the opportunity to research the thesis which was the starting point
for this book. My principal supervisors Mark Clapson and Tony Gorst provided
invaluable advice on many occasions.
All historians owe a debt to archives and their custodians. Within the
University, the Archives team of Elaine Penn, Anna McNally, Claire Brunnen
and Rebecca Short have been unfailingly helpful. Among the numerous other
archivists who have given assistance I am especially grateful to Paul Smith of
Thomas Cook; Tony Lees of Manchester County Records Office; Sinead
Wheeler of Toynbee Hall; and Paul Wetherall of Manx National Heritage.
Eloise Hansen, Heather Williams and Karyn Burnham at Pen and Sword
Books Ltd have been responsive, helpful and supportive editors. Dominic Allen
came up with the beautiful cover design.
Finally, the encouragement and support of my long-suffering wife Helen
has been, as always, essential.
Chapter 1
Introduction
All travel has its advantages. If the passenger visits better countries,
he may learn to improve his own, and if fortune carries him to worse,
he may learn to enjoy it.
(Samuel Johnson, Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland, 1775)
The modern history of holidays for the British people is, perhaps surprisingly,
one of the aspects of travel and tourism on which historians have written
relatively little. Certainly travel in its widest sense has a long, rich and varied
heritage as any reader of Herodotus, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales or the tales of
Sir John Mandeville or Marco Polo – or, for that matter, of Samuel Johnson and
James Boswell – will know.
Major motivations for travel have included pilgrimage, commerce,
exploration and colonisation, sometimes in combination and not always initiated
by the British. Witness, for example, two key events of 1735: a French
expedition to attempt to confirm whether the earth was a (Cartesian) perfect
sphere or a (Newtonian) spheroid with flat poles; and the publication of The
System of Nature by Carl Linnaeus, a Swedish naturalist, which tried to classify
all plants into one system.
Nonetheless, the British have traditionally played a central role in many
accounts of continental and global travel over the centuries. The obvious
example of this was the network of European journeys known as the Grand
Tour, especially from the late eighteenth century onwards, as the upper classes
sent their sons abroad for a mixture of reasons, which Jeremy Black has