Chapter 1. "What Ought to Be Seen": Murray, Baedeker, Ruskin, and the Guidebook Industry

This chapter examines the history of the guidebook from early prototypes, such as John Chetwode Euastace's 1802 A Classical Tour through Italy, which Dickens lampooned in Little Dorrit, to the restricted travel of the First World War and the demise of Murray's Handbooks for Travellers in 1915.

A complete abstract is coming soon.

John Ruskin's Mornings in Florence: An Interactive Guidebook

When Ruskin began writing Mornings in Florence, he wrote in his diary, "Lay long awake planning my attack on Murray." Ruskin was irritated at what he called the "tourist hurry" encouraged by Murray's Handbook for Travellers, and took great delight in pointing out its flaws and inaccuracies. A large portion of Ruskin's criticism was class-based: Murray's was the guidebook of choice (and for decades the only guidebook, as we know the term today) for the uneducated masses brought to Europe by Thomas Cook and others. Ruskin wanted to produce a guidebook for the cultured upper-middle-class traveller, like himself. The result is that much of his own book is a commentary as much about Murray as it is about Florence. In the years following Mornings in Florence'a publication, E. M. Forster had as much to say about Ruskin as Ruskin had about Murray.

Ruskin's short chapters were meant to be "in the places which they describe, or before the pictures to which they refer," but most of his readers today are scholars or armchair travellers, neither of which may have the extensive knowledge of Florentine art to know every fresco or tomb which Ruskin describes. This interactive edition of Ruskin allows these readers, for the first time, to see the sights he describes. I have also cross-referenced original passages from Murray and Forster.

Thusfar, "Morning One" is the only chapter available, with the remaining chapters following soon. You can read more about the planning and building of this project on my blog.

Chapter 2. 'Everyone has wept and Gurgled': Originality, Subjectivity, and the Hypertextuality of Travel Writing in the Long Nineteenth Century

The second chapter of my dissertation discusses the travel writings and memoirs of a diverse group of British and American writers, includin Charles Dickens, Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Robbins Pennell, Henry James, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, and Lilian Bell.

A full synopsis of this chapter is coming soon.

The micro-project for this chapter uses GIS technology to map itineraries from multiple travelogues. These itineraries are presented in layers, allowing two or more itineraries to be compared for spatial and diachronic analysis. Users will be able to see instances where writers follow similar routes, sometimes visiting the same cities at the same times. The map will also show the changing shape of the Grand Tour, as British and American tourism becomes increasingly global. In the first phase of this project, only travelogues and memoirs discussed in my dissertation will be mapped. In future phases, this project will be open-access for crowd-sourced itineraries, building an extensive library of data on travel literature.

A user-friendly interface is still being developed, and will be published here as soon as it is available.

Mapping Travel Writing

The first stage of this beta project maps the locations mentioned in Charles Dickens's travelogue Pictures from Italy. More texts and features will be added as the project progresses.

Chapter 3. Beyond 'The Surface of Things': Tourism and the Deconstruction of the Picturesque in Victorian and Edwardian Fiction

This chapter examines fictional tourists and their travels, from Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit to E.M. Forster's A Room with a View. Tourists are usually shown as stereotypcal guidebook readers, blindly following their text abd blissfully ignorant of "authentic" culture. This chapter seeks to complicate these tourists types, showing a much more nuanced representation of tourism as a narrative device.

The project that accompanies this chapter is still in the early planning stages, but will include TEI analysis and topic modelling. As a preview of what's to come, the image to the left is a Word Cloud made with Wordle, modeling the third chapter of the dissertation.

The Picturesque vs. the Photographic

In the opening pages of E. M. Forster's "The Story of Panic" (1902), a group of English tourists picnic on an Italian hillside, admiring the view. One tourist exlaims, "What a pretty picture it would make!" Another adds, "Many a famous European gallery would be proud to have a landscape a tithe as beautiful as this upon its walls." As they all join in praise of the "landscape," "vista," and "panorama," one voice counters the others. Leyland, a snobby, artistic young man, argues, "On the contrary...it would make a very poor picture. Indeed, it is not paintable at all...Look, in the first place...how intolerably straight against the sky is the line of the hill. It would need breaking up and diversifying. And where we are standing the whole thing is out of perspective. Besides, all the colouring is monotonous and crude...You all confuse the artistic view of Nature with the photographic."

Unlike his companions, Leyland is clearly familiar with William Gilpin's formulae for the picturesque--that the picturesque is never smooth, but requires roughness, variation, and a tripartite perspective consisting of a foreground, middle distance, and far distance. Leyland, and by extention, Forster, would have been among the few tourists in Italy who still understood the picturesque in terms of eighteenth century aesthetics. Most people, like the tourists upon the hillside, understood "picturesque" to simply mean "beautiful," as we usually use the term today.

Most scholars of the nineteenth century have argued that picturesque, as Gilpin and Leyland understand it, had disappeared by the early 1800s, even Jane Austen poked fun at Gilpins rules for being old fashioned. By the 1840s, photography had captured the visual imagination, the last nail in Gilpin's aesthetic coffin.

My research seems to show the opposite: that, in fact, the picturesque continues to be central to tourism throughout the nineteenth century and into the twentieth century. The picturesque informed how Forster, Henry James, Vernon Lee, and others saw and understood the landscapes and people around them. Now, with big data applications, such as Google Ngram, we can show exactly how long-lasting discussions of picturesqueare in our publication history. Photography, on the other hand, or even photographic takes much longer to supercede the influence of the picturesque than anyone previous expected.

This Ngram view of picturesque shows that the term was certainly in sharp decline during Austen's time, but not long before 1820, that is, approximately concurrent with the publication of Northanger Abbey, the picturesque was again on the rise. The 1830s saw a marked increase in publications that mention the picturesque; not surprisingly, most of these texts are travel guides, art texts, or a combination of both, such as Heath's Picturesque Annual. By the mid-nineteenth century, books on picturesque scenes, such as J, M. W. Turner's Picturesque Views of the Southern Coast of England (1826), have virtually disappeared, replaced in popularity by Black's Picturesque Tour guidebooks. The picturesque actually begins to disappear from the publication data around the turn of the twentieth century when, as mentioned in the previous chapter, Henry James stops using the term, and Forster openly criticizes its misuse. It is not until around 1939, just prior to the Second World War, that photography or photographic becomes more frequently used in publications than picturesque.

The above paragraph is taken from the dissertation.

Chapter 4. Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction: Aesthetics and Semiotics in the Ephemera of Travel

This site is under construction. A full description of this chapter is coming soon, accompanied by a currated digital gallery of tourist ephemera.