boorstin7

86 From Traveler to Tourirt:

are worth recalling. First and most obvious was the easing of transportation. In the latter part of the nineteenth century railroads and ocean steamers began to make travel actually pleasurable. Discomfort and risks were suddenly reduced. For the first time in history, long-distance transportation was industrially mass-produced. It could be sold to lots of people, and it could be sold cheap. For a satisfactory return on in-vestment, it had to be sold in large quantities. The Capital invested in any of the old vehicles—a stagecoach or the pas-senger quarters in a sailing ship—was minutę compared with that in a railroad (even a single sleeping car) or a luxury liner. This enonnous Capital investment required that equip-ment be kept in constant use and that passengers be found by the thousands. Now great numbers of people would be in-duced to travel for pleasure. Vast ocean steamers could not be filled with diplomats, with people traveling on business, or with aristocratic Henry Adamses who were intent on deepen-ing their education. The consuming public had to be en-larged to include the vacationing middle class, or at least the upper middle class. Foreign travel became democratized.

The obvious next step was the “personally Vęonducted \ ttmr/’ Well-planned group excursions could entice even the morę timid stay-at-homes. Of course guided tours of one sort or another had been very old: the Crusades had sometimes taken on this character. We can recall, in Chaucer’s Canter-bury Tales, in the late fourteenth century, the knowledge-able, generous host of the Tabard Inn, who offered

And for to make yow the moore mury,

I wol myselven goodly with yow ryde,

Right at myn owene cost, and be youre gyde. . . .

But later guides seldom offered their services free. The guided tour itself actually became a commodity. Adventure would be sold in packages and guaranteed to be consumed without risk. In England, with its short distances, its rising middle classes, and its early-developed railroads, came the/first or-ganized tours. According to legend the very first of tfienf was

The Lost Art of Travel    gy

arranged in 1838 to take the people of Wadebridge by spccial train to the nearby town of Bodmin. There they witnessed the hanging of two murderers. Since the Bodmin gallows were in elear sight of the uncovered station, excur-sionists had their fun without even leaving the open railway carriages.

The real pioneer in the making and marketing of con-ducted tours was of course Thomas Coo3&( 1808-1892). He began in the early 1840’s by arranging special-rate railroad excursions within England. His first planned tour took nearly 600 people the eleven miles from Leicester to Loughborough for a temperance convention—at a reduced round-trip third-class farę of one shilling a head. Soon Cook was sending hundreds to Scotland (1846) and Ireland (1848), and for thousands was arranging tours of the Crystal Pałace Exposi-tion in London in 1851. In 1856 he advertised his first “grand circular tour of the Continent,” visiting Antwerp, Brussels, the Field of Waterloo, Cologne, the Rhine and its borders, Mayence, Frankfort, Heidelberg, Baden-Baden, Strasbourg, Paris, Le Havre, and back to London. Then, witli tbe help of his enterprising son, he offered Swiss tours, American tours, and finally, in 1869, the first middle-class Conducted Crusade to the Holy Land. He ąuickly developed all kinds of conveniences: courteous and knówledgeable guides, hotel coupons, room reservations, and protection and advice against disease and thievery.

Sophisticated Englishmen objected. They said that Cook was 'depriving travelers of initiative and adventure and clutteringThETontinental landscape with the Philistine middle classes. “Going by railroad,” complained John Ruskin, “I do not consider as travelling at all; it is merely being ‘sent’. to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel.” An article in Blackwood’s Magazine in February, 1865, by a British consul in Italy, attacked this “new and growing eyil , . . of conducting some forty or fifty persons, irrespec-tive of age or sex, from London to Naples and back for a fixed sum.” “The Cities of Italy,” he lamented, were now