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Traveller Toffs and Tourist Scum: Representations and Realities of Tourism in Victorian England
From: Science Museum and The Victoria and Albert Museum
| By:
Tony Seaton |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The distinction between the traveller and the tourist is an invention of the Victorian era, primarily as a convenience to the middle classes. With the growth of tourism during the nineteenth century came the need for educated people to draw a distinction between the edifying practices of the Grand Tour, and mere hedonism. But according to Tony Seaton, professor of tourism behaviour at the University of Luton, who spoke at "Locating the Victorians", this ideological distinction is problematic, and has only strengthened in the present day. |
 octor Johnson once remarked that no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, by which he meant that what people actually do with their time is a more reliable indicator of their tastes, than what they claim to like and dislike. Tourism grew exponentially during the Victorian period, particularly among the middle classes, occupying between six and 12 weeks of personal time a year, yet it was something from which most educated folk came to disassociate themselves nominally, with shuddering distaste. I shall ask how this doublethink was achieved and trace it to the invention of an ideological distinction between tourism, on the one hand, and travel on the other. The distinction, which did not exist in 1800 when the words traveller and tourist were synonyms, came to be emphasised, as more and more people became tourists, thus reducing the social cache of tourism, which had been associated with the elite groups who undertook the Grand Tour. Above all, when the working classes began to travel, first on day excursions and then for longer periods, the middle classes protected the supposed difference and superiority of their own practices by deeming it travel not tourism. I shall suggest that the distinction and the misrecognition that lies at the heart of it has been one the most enduring legacies of Victorian society, and one which has increased its ideological hold today. |
In focussing on the ideological and social impacts of tourism I shall address three main themes:
the naturalisation and thematisation of tourism,
the impact of tourism on Victorian family life and gender issues, and class differences within Victorian tourism. |
I shall use graphic exhibits, primarily from the world of caricature and cartoon, to illustrate my points. This is not merely to sweeten the pill, but forms part of the argument itself which is that though high art represented the goals of travel (landscape and picturesque scenery), it virtually excluded the tourist as a subject, while graphic art--less self-consciously, ennobling in its aims--provided an acute and incessant commentary on tourists throughout the Victorian period. |
The naturalisation and thematisation of tourism
Tourism is today such a taken-for-granted practice that it is hard to imagine a time when it was not. It is no longer seen as an optional luxury, but a social imperative. This was not so in the generation before Victoria. In the first three decades of the century tourism was still something of a new fangled wonder, popularly seen in two main lights. On the one hand it was regarded as an absurdity to be satirised by those who couldn't see the point of going places you didn't have to, to look at things that had never been seen as remarkable before--rural scenery, winding streams, mouldering ruins and all the subjects of the newly developed romantic tastes for the picturesque, the sublime and the sentimental. This scepticism can be found in the success of "The three tours of Dr Syntax", written by the hack writer, William Combe, with illustrations by Thomas Rowlandson. The books offered a burlesque account of the adventures of an ageing country vicar, determined to keep up with latest picturesque fashion by sight seeing tours, that he could later make money from writing about. The three books were widely reprinted from 1812 to the accession of Victoria, and spawned many imitations emphasising the ridiculous aspects of tourism. |
 For others, particularly the rising commercial classes, attitudes to tourism were different. Far from sceptical, they saw it as a fashion with high-status credentials in aristocratic practice, and thus, a vehicle for the acquisition of gentility. But they were not clear what it involved and how it should be done. The role of the tourist had to be self-consciously learned, which is why there were manuals on how to do it, in the same way that there were later etiquette books on other aspects of social behaviour. These manuals offered rules and maxims for tourists, including tuition in the new aesthetic modes necessary for appreciation of romantic nature and scenery. |
During Victoria's reign both attitudes to tourism--satirical mockery and a desire to learn the rules, diminished. Tourism was not just naturalised, but thematised so effectively that most of the main kinds of tourism we know today--tastes for the seaside, romantic scenery, antiquarian heritage, literary and artistic pilgrimage--became widely understood and came to seem like natural facts of life. |
 As Victoria's reign progressed, fewer and fewer needed to have tourism explained to them. It became a game that everybody knew how to play. Sight seeing became part of the currency of living in an industrial society as this 1863 slide shows. |
 What had created the change? Demography to begin with. In all countries there is a direct link between the growth of urbanisation and the tourism habit. In 1800 only 25 percent of the population lived in cities. By 1900 the figure was 75 percent. The industrial city was and remains an impetus to escape to sea or countryside as this cartoon cover of 1863 by Phiz suggested.
Another reason was, of course, transport technology--the triumph of the steam-driven, iron-clad ship and the railway that provided rapid access to Europe, the Empire, the World. |
A major legitimising influence on tourism was the royal family. Before Victoria royal tours had commonly been political spectacle or, male hedonism, as with George III's enjoyment of Weymouth and the Regent's stag parties in Brighton. Victoria and Albert became fashion leaders for a more domesticated, family kind of tourism that started with the Queen's state visit to Scotland in 1840 and ended up as annual holidays at Balmoral, hardly more than a cottage in 1843, but a small country house retreat by the early 1850s. The growing fashion for Scotland, which had started with the publications of Sir Walter Scott 30 years earlier, was consolidated. It is hard to underrate the royal impact both on the popularity of Scotland as a destination and on the dissemination of tourism as acceptable family practice. Victoria normalised the notion of the private/public holiday that effectively made tourism the first leisure activity to get the Royal Warrant, particularly after the publication of her two books of highland diaries in the 1860s and 1870s. |
The naturalisation of tourism was reinforced and fed by the growth of a lucrative, ancillary consumer culture. The aristocrat on the Grand Tour had returned with trunks full of curiosities and objects of virtu, and wearing French clothes. The Victorian tourist too increasingly had access to a bewildering flow of consumer goods, created by new mass production processes, and bought as travelling aids, or conspicuous consumption to mark one's status as a traveller. This vast tourism supply market can be tasted in the bulging advertising supplements of guidebooks like Murray's, Black's and Bradshaw's. Goods on offer comprised those designed for purchase before and during the trip, as well as take-home mementos afterwards. They included the following:
portmanteaux, dressing cases, travelling desks, travelling cigar cases, waterproof knapsacks, touring boots, medicine chests, fatness cures before the trip, toothache cures, treatments for corns, bunions and baldness, liver pills, sun tan protectors' bicycles, portable boats and canoes, fishing equipment, compasses, barometers, telescopes, guns, wines shipped to the station of your choice, maps, atlases and guidebooks, railway novels, and travelling couriers and servants.
 Above all fashion itself was a major accessory, with styles targeted at both men and women. Women's holiday fashion was a particular butt of the caricaturist as this 1864 cartoon by Punch artist John Leech shows. |
Tourism in Victorian family life
The holiday became a great family ritual, institutionalised in English life, and has remained so since. By the 1850s and 1860s railways were well established throughout Britain and Europe and, with Bradshaw's British, Continental and Indian guidebooks to deatil connections, town descriptions and hotel accomodation, the family could make its own way, withough necessarily using the services of Thomas Cook. |
Thus it was that the role of paterfamilias grew beyond being ruler in the home that was his castle, to epic, expeditionary leader of a party that might vary from four people to more than a dozen, and involve a stay in Scotland, the Lake District or Europe, lasting between six weeks and a month. |
Tourism opened up new spaces, physically, socially and psychologically, for the Victorians. It was not just a change of place, but a change in the possibilities of social relations and identity. Not just a room with a view, but a passing show one might sometimes join. In addition to the grand spaces of landscape and vista, tourism trips comprised micro-spaces in which to be observed and to observe others: at meal times in the communal dining rooms of hotels and ships; at gatherings in hotel lounges after dinner; from balconies that opened on to streets; in deck corners of cruise ships and steamers; in the congregations of English churches abroad; in the unavoidable intimacy of railway carriages and customs houses; among sightseeing groups at galleries or museums; in quiet corners of a beach or field. All could be theatres of social enactment, where self-presentations could be manipulated for larger and more interesting audiences than any at home, and also, given the transience of tourism encounters, ones less capable of blowing one's cover. In tourism settings a multitude of social distinctions and hierarchical discriminations could be noted and relayed, and women were adept at doing so. |
The psycho-social impacts of tourism were arguably greatest for women. It's a cliché that in Victorian society home and private life were the woman's sphere; the external world of business and public affairs, the man's. Tourism constituted a hybrid space between the two that, while allowing the woman to remain within the conventional gendered and familial role, took her out of her habitual locus operandi, and gave her a window on to a wider external world than that of home sweet home. |
 For the young, tourism offered the promise, and sometimes the fulfilment of romantic encounters that would have been more difficult in the policed and restricted circles of home. Family parties might include new faces--an attractive distant cousin, a school friend of one's brother, the daughter of a business partner of one's father. And even if they did not, the tourism trip comprised a variety of fast-changing, social contexts that offered young people, or could be manipulated to offer them, pretexts for contact with strangers, as well enabling them to attract, or escape, inspection, while the attention of relatives and guardians was turned to other things. |
 For the unattached woman the social geography of boats was thought to be a particularly promising space for flirtations and encounters. |
"The paradise of the seaside flirt is a yacht. No horrid billiard room to take up the time of an interesting man; no need to run away from cigar smoke in the exhilarating fresh air; frequent nips of mulled wines to keep the cold out, prescribed as indispensable to health; and then the privilege of appearing to lose one's balance and needing the prop of a stalwart arm. No visible impropriety either if the proprietor of the stalwart arm does hug a little in conveying the fair and unsteady one to a seat. Add to this that Etiquette, which would be shocked by seeing Miss Jill and Mr. Jack walking up and down an hotel corridor for an hour at midnight, can look on unmoved at a moonlight promenade on the deck of a yacht, even when it extends pretty far into the small hours." |
 Finally, the growth of tourism created the first generations of women travel writers. In family groups, or in the conducted parties of Thomas Cook they could travel in security, so the range of their world experience extended. Women had hardly travelled before the nineteenth century. The Grand Tour had been an all-male preserve. The Victorian tourism boom acted as a form of empowerment, and it is no coincidence that by the end of the century scores of Victorian women had published travel books as Jane Robinson has usefully inventoried. |
And the ideologies were different. Middle class tourism, though ultimately as hedonistic as the working class version, was inflected with a rationale of self-improvement, culture and high purpose--connotations of travel, rather than tourism. Appearances had to be maintained. Even holiday romances were conducted differently. |
 Not all working class tourism was loud and extrovert. Many skilled artisans espoused the values of respectability and accepted the hegemonic leadership of educational, religious or temperance groups, which resulted in such tourism events as the Sunday School outing.
And through all, the ideology of the traveller and the tourist was there to be explicitly or implicitly mobilised by class groups to support the superiority of one set of tourism practices at the expense of others. |
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