Chapter 2 - Travel and Travel Writing in the Nineteenth Century

Summary

New Technologies and New Notions

During the course of the first half of the nineteenth century, steam technology—in the shape of steamboats, railways and finally transoceanic steamships—transformed travel first in Europe and then globally. What it brought with it was not simply speed, but, crucially, regularity. Steamships were not vulnerable to the daily hazards of bad weather or the yearly cycles of winds and monsoons as sailing ships are, and thus schedules and arrivals became more predictable and routinised. The same applied to train services, especially with the addition of Morse telegraph lines along the tracks, introduced on the Paris-Rouen line in 1845 and providing for the easy and quick passage of information along the network. The British mapmaker George Bradshaw began to publish domestic railway timetables in 1839 and continental ones from 1847 on, another important step in facilitating travel planning and comfort. Furthermore, it is important to note that this process of regularisation of travel could, and did, also occur without steam power: for example, Robin Jarvis has noted how the mailcoach system established in Britain in 1784 had a similar effect on increasing the predictability, speed and security of travel just before and during the early stages of, the railway era. This regularisation of travel was of great importance for the emerging culture of tourism, for the latter depended on routine and predictability. The tours organised by Thomas Cook's famously pioneering travel agency spread their tentacles along railway and steamboat lines. Cook's enterprise, taking form in the early 1840s, was by no means the only one: the institutional framework for tourism was growing quickly where the technological prerequisites had been laid down. Guidebooks to popular destinations quickly became commonplace, championed by the rival Murray and Baedeker companies. Karl Baedeker jumped into guidebook publishing in 1835, not coincidentally with a reworked edition of a guide to the Rhine.5 This brought about the emergence of a new genre. Guides had of course been used for a long time, but the new “handbook”—a term coined by John Murray II in 1836 and later adopted in the Baedeker Handbücher—was something different, characterised by standardisation: the guides were of a standardised pocket size, had standardised designs and presented information in set, compact ways.