boorstin6

From Traveler to Tourist:

84

science of roadbuilding was developed and cheap and effec-tive hard-surfacing became possible.

The travel experience was an adventure, too, simply be-cause so few could afford or would dare its hardships. The modem hotel—the place which George Bernard Shaw later praised as “a refuge from home life”—had not been in-vented. In the picturesque inn of the travel books every I comforj had to be specially negotiated. The luxury of a pri-vate~bed was hard to come by, not only because of the con-stant companionship of cockroaches, bedbugs, and fleas, but because innkeepers felt free to assign morę than one guest to a bed. Englishmen traveling in France noted how rare it v ' was to encounter fellow trayelers, much less fellow country-

tr__metT.i Arthur Young in the late eighteenth century found “a

paucity of travellers that is amazing”; he traveled a whole day on a main road thirty miles outside of Paris and “met but a single gentlemani carriage, nor anything else on the road that looked like a gentleman.” Even later, when sleeping accommodations had improved, the traveler on the con-tinent might expect to find “comfortable hotels, but no un-comfortable crowds.” As late as the 1860’s an English traveler to Holland noted that “tourists were comparatively rare and there were no cheap trippers.”

11

U

Sometime past the middle of the nineteenth. century, as ijPthe Graphic Revolution was getting under way,( the character ,'pr óf foreign travel—first by Europeans, and then by Amer-icans—began to change/>This change has reached its climax in our day. Formerly travel recjuired long planning, large expense, and great investments of time. It involved risks to health or even to life. The traveler was active. Now he became passive. Instead of an athletic exercise, travel became a spectator sport.

This change can be described in a word. It was the decline

of the traveler and the rise of the tourist. There is a wonder-ful, but neglected, precision in these words. The old English noun “travel” (in the sense of a joumey) was originally the same word as “travail” (meaning “trouble,” “work,” or “torment”). And the word “travail,” in tum, seems to have been derived, through the French, from a popular Latin or Common Romanie word trepalium, which meant a three-staked instrument of torturę. To joumey—to “travail,” or (later) to travel—then was to do something laborious or troublesome. The traveler was an active man at work.

In the early nineteenth century a new word came into the English language which gave a clue to the changed character of world travel, especially from the American point of view. This was the word “tourist”—at first hyphen-ated as (Jtour-ist^f Our American dictionary now defines a tourist as “a person who makes a(pleasure'trip” or “a person who makes a tour, especially for pleasufe?’ Significantly, too, the word “tour” in “tourist” was derived by back-formation from the Latin tornus, which in tum came from the Greek word for a tool describing a^circle. The traveler, then, was working at something; the tourist was a pleasure-seeker. The traveler was active; he went strenuously in search of people, of adventure, of experience. The tourist is passive; he expects interesting things to happen to him. He goes “sight-seeing” (a word, by the way, which came in about the same time, with its first use recorded in 1847). He expects everything to be done to him and for him.    ~~ “

Thuś fóreign travel ceased to be an activity—an experi-ence, an undertaking—and instead became a commodity. The rise of the tourist was possible, and then inevitable, when attractive items of travel were wrapped up and sold in pack-ages (the ‘Ipackage toin”). By buying a tour you could oblige somebody elśe~tcr~makć' pleasant and interesting things happen to you. You could buy Wholesale (by the month or week, or by the country) or retail (by the day or by the individual foreign capital).

The familiar circumstances which had brought this about