sections:
The nineteenth century saw a transformation of British travel to Europe: from the aristocratic Grand Tour of the eighteenth century to the mass tourism of the early twentieth. Indeed, mass tourism is largely a British creation. How this transformation took place is the subject of this book. It picks up where the many books on the Grand Tour end.
The book will be a vast canvas made up of individual people ranging from well known travellers such as the Trollope family to people famous in other ways such as Gladstone and Queen Victoria. We follow these individuals as our continuous narrative links as they travelled to see how travel developed after Waterloo and then exploded into mass tourism. Travel was a mirror of Victorian life: it gradually expanded both in numbers and in comfort.
The book is divided into two parts. The first looks at the realities of travel: how people got passports, coped with money, crossed the channel, bought souvenirs, kept in touch. We discuss the various groups of travellers: culture-vultures, the scandalous, gays, commercial travellers and women. We look at the development of guide books and at why people travelled: for education, health, religion or a foreign honeymoon. We look at those who lived permanently in Europe and at the influence of all this travel on English life, literature and politics.
The second part looks at the places people visited: Paris, the Rhine, the South of France, Italy, Switzerland, the Austrian Empire and lesser visited places such as Spain or Norway. We discuss how people kept in touch with Britain, how they smuggled goods past Customs and what were their reactions when they came home.
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