Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century by Lori N

Home , Circle of confusion, Framing (visual arts), John Henry Twachtman, Zone plate

Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century

by Lori N. Brister

B.A. in English, May 2004, The University of Southern Mississippi M.A. in English, November 2006, University of Exeter

A dissertation submitted to

The Faculty of The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

May 17, 2015

Dissertation directed by

Jennifer Green-Lewis Associate Professor of English

The Columbian College of Arts and Sciences of The George Washington University certifies that Lori N. Brister has passed the Final Examination for the degree of Doctor of

Philosophy as of March 27, 2015. This is the final and approved form of the dissertation.

Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century

Lori N. Brister

Dissertation Research Committee:

Jennifer Green-Lewis, Associate Professor of English, Dissertation Director

Maria Frawley, Professor of English, Committee Member

Judith Plotz, Professor Emerita of English, Committee Member

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Dedication

To my mother, Bonnie Brister, whose love of reading first inspired me to write, and to my fiancée, Julie Seigel, who writes every story with me.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my Dissertation Director, Jennifer Green-Lewis, whose many years of mentorship has touched every word I have written and every class I have taught. I would also like to thank my committee members, Maria Frawley and Judith

Plotz, for their invaluable guidance and encouragement throughout my doctoral studies.

Many thanks to Daniel DeWispelare and Nathan Hensley for graciously giving your time to read my work. I am very grateful to Ana Parejo-Vadillo, who shaped this project in its infancy as my Master’s dissertation director at Exeter University, and for the constant support and wisdom of Kavita Daiya, who has taught me to take up more space in the room.

I could not have made it this far without the love and unconditional support of my friends and family. I want to thank Amber Cobb Vazquez, who has come through this entire process with me and has been, both professionally and personally, a calm voice in every storm. My parents and family have been my cheering section for as long as I can remember. I am incredibly lucky, and not just a little spoiled, to be surrounded by such strong, smart, funny women as my mother and sisters, who have shared every tear and every triumph. Everything I have ever achieved, or ever will, is because of the love, strength, and friendship of my mother, Bonnie Brister. You have brought me through this. And, finally, I would like to thank Julie Seigel, who saw the long nights of writing until the early morning hours and the mountains of paper that filled our home, and still said yes one snowy night in February. The rest of my life is yours.

Abstract of Dissertation

Looking for the Picturesque: Tourism, Visual Culture, and the Literature of Travel in the Long Nineteenth Century

This dissertation examines the interstices of tourism, visual culture, and the literature of travel, including guidebooks, travel narratives, novels, and ephemera.

Situating the origins of sight-seeing in the picturesque aesthetics of the late eighteenth century, I argue that the literature of travel acts as a textual lens through which tourists and travel writers look for signs of picturesque aesthetics and stereotypes of local culture, particularly when travelling in Italy. Ultimately, my dissertation takes two divergent strands of scholarship, aesthetics and semiotics, and examines how they are inherently and inextricably linked via touristic reading practices.

My first chapter examines the guidebooks of John Murray, Karl Baedeker, and

John Ruskin. Murray and Baedeker’s guidebooks include itineraries and star-systems that taught tourists to look for picturesque and/ or stereotypical signs of a given culture.

Ruskin critiques Murray’s methodologies, but, because his text is also a guidebook, he cannot avoid contributing to the textual mediation of tourism. Chapter 2 is a study of intertextuality and aesthetic subjectivity in the travelogues of Charles Dickens, Amelia

Edwards, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and

Lilian Bell. In my third chapter, I trace the development of the picturesque gaze in the novels of Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James, and E.M. Forster. In Chapter 4, I read tourist ephemera and iconography as the material artifacts of visual culture. My coda presents a case study of the travel scrapbooks of Isabel Stewart Gardner to show how a single tourist experienced the intersections of tourism, text, visual culture, and ephemera.

For the Digital Dissertation Companion visit loribrister.com/dissertation.html.

Table of Contents

Dedication ...... iv

Acknowledgements ...... v

Abstract ...... vi

Table of Contents ...... vii

List of Figures ...... viii

Frontispiece ...... x

Introduction ...... 1

Chapter 1. “Glad to learn so much without looking”: Aesthetics and

Semiotics of Guidebooks ...... 18

Chapter 2. “Everyone has wept and gurgled”: Originality, Subjectivity, and the

Intertextuality of Travel Writing ...... 54

Chapter 3. “Somebody else’s sieve”: Tourism, Textual Mediation,

and the Picturesque Gaze ...... 109

Chapter 4. Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

The Ephemera of Travel …………………………...... 164

Coda. Post-Tourism: What Comes After? ...... 217

Works Cited ...... 232

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List of Figures

Frontispiece. Doctor Syntax Sketches the Lake by Thomas Rowlandson ...... x

Figure 1. La trahison des images by René Magritte ...... 167

Figure 2. La reproduction interdite by René Magritte ...... 168

Figure 3. Loch Katrine by William Henry Fox Talbot ...... 175

Figure 4. At Lake Cuomo by Alfred Stieglitz ...... 177

Figure 5. Great Pyramid and Sphinx by Francis Frith ...... 178

Figure 6. Forum Trajanum, Rome by Edmond Behles ...... 182

Figure 7. Venezia by Carlo Naya ………………………………………………...…… 184

Figure 8. Interior of the Secundra Bagh by Felice Beato …………………………….. 190

Figure 9. Thomas Cook Advertisement for Transportation to the Great Exhibition ..... 198

Figure 10. Cover of Guide to Cook’s Tours in France, Switzerland, and Italy ...... 198

Figure 11. Brochure art for ‘Cook’s Tours Round the Globe,’ ...... 200

Figure 12. A Cook’s Ticket, South Eastern & Chatham Railway ...... 201

Figure 13. Luggage label for Grand Hôtel d’Angleterre, Chamonix ...... 203

Figure 14. Hotel & Kurhaus, St. Blasien ...... 204

Figure 15. Bertolini’s Palace, Naples, Italy ...... 204

Figure 16. Bertolini’s Hôtel Europe, Milan, Italy ...... 204

Figure 17. Grand Hôtel Naples ...... 205

Figure 18. Gd. Hotel “Royal” ...... 205

Figure 19. National Hotel, Cairo ...... 207

Figure 20. Bristol Hotel, Cairo ...... 207

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Figure 21. Shepheard’s Hotel, Cairo, Egypt ...... 207

Figure 22. Péra Palace, Constantinople ...... 208

Figure 23. Péra Palace, Constantinople (with Arabic script) ...... 208

Figure 24. Péra Palace, Istanbul ...... 208

Figure 25. Google Ngram of picturesque :: photographic ...... 228

“Doctor Syntax Sketching the Lake” by Thomas Rowlandson, from William Combe’s

1812 The Tour of Dr. Syntax in Search of the Picturesque (110)

Introduction

In 1809, William Combe published a long, satirical poem called The Tour of Dr

Syntax in Search of the Picturesque, featuring caricatures by Thomas Rowlandson. The poem tells the story of a clergyman who decides to make his fortune writing a travel book in the style of Doctor Pompous, a thinly veiled reference to Rev. William Gilpin, an

English clergyman who rode through the British country side, comparing natural scenery to landscape paintings, particularly those by Sir Joshua Reynolds and Claude Lorrain.

Gilpin had written several enormously successful treatises on picturesque aesthetics, and his influence is felt throughout the nineteenth century. By Combe’s writing, Gilpin had fallen out of fashion and was already the subject of parodies and satires. In Combe’s tale,

Dr Syntax tells his wife:

I’ll make a tour—and then I’ll write it.

You know what my pen can do,

And I’ll employ my pencil too:--

I’ll ride and write, and sketch and print,

And thus create a real mint;

I’ll prose it here, I’ll verse it there,

I’ll Picturesque it everywhere. (6)

Dr Syntax, whose name alludes to Gilpin’s rules and lexicon for viewing the landscape, rides throughout England with Pompous/ Gilpin’s instructions for reading the picturesque in mind. With his experience already pre-scripted, Dr Syntax produces his own texts and sketches, but fails to engage with or even look directly at the sights.

Gilpin wrote Three Essays: On Picturesque Beauty; On Picturesque Travel; and

On Sketching Landscape: to which is added a poem, On Landscape Sketching1 (1792) largely in response to Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our

Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757). Burke relates the sublime to “violent emotions” and “a passion similar to terror” (147), often experienced when looking at an object or sight of awe-inspiring size. The Alps are an example of a sublime landscape frequented by tourists. If the sublime requires terror and/or size, beauty, on the other hand, depends upon the object or scene being smooth: “I do not now recollect anything beautiful that was not smooth…for take any beautiful object, and give it a broken and rugged surface, and however well formed it may be in other respects, it pleases no longer” (133).

Gilpin takes issue with Burke’s definitions, adding the picturesque as a sub- category of beauty. Burke mentions the picturesque once, but only to disregard it; while

Gilpin takes the first step towards defining picturesque aesthetics when he writes,

“Roughness forms the most essential point of difference between the beautiful, and the picturesque, as it seems to be that particular quality, which makes objects chiefly pleasing in painting” (Three Essays 6). Gilpin goes on to lay out specific formulae for viewing the picturesque, based on a tripartite perspective. The foreground may include a small grouping of figures, always in odd numbers; these figures are inconsequential and included primarily to give scale to the scene. Mountains usually take up the hazy far- distance, while the eye of the observer is drawn towards the middle distance, focusing on a ruin or other architectural feature. In Gilpin’s words: “The foreground is commonly but an appendage. The middle distance generally makes the scene, and requires the most

1 For brevity, I will use the abbreviated title Three Essays for future references. 2

distinction” (175). Gilpin’s ideal of the picturesque is based upon the rugged landscape of rural Britain, but, like Edmund Burke’s theories of the sublime and the beautiful, the picturesque was also soon adopted by travelers to the Continent.

For my purposes, Gilpin makes two significant contributions to the study of tourism. First, he indelibly links tourism and travel writing to art—following Gilpin’s example, one travelled in order to see scenes that resembled paintings, and then wrote about them. Many of the texts I discuss in this dissertation are specifically about art and travelling to see art, and all of the texts touch on visual culture and its relationship to tourism. Second, and most importantly, Gilpin’s emphasis on a rough and unrefined landscape established the goal of any sight-seer in Europe to search out rugged cliffs, crumbling hilltop villages, and simple, poverty-stricken country peasants.

To aid in their search for the picturesque, tourists used an optical device called a

Claude glass, named for the French painter Claude Lorrain. The Claude glass was a hand- held mirror made of darkened, convex glass. Gilpin writes, the Claude glass “give[s] the object of nature a soft, mellowing tinge, like the coloring of that Master”2 (Observations

124). To use the glass, the Grand Tourist must turn his3 back on the sight in order to see—and paint—its reflection in the mirror. To put it more explicitly, the tourist did not look directly at the landscape; the scene was always mediated, framed, and given a particular aesthetic quality. These travel texts—whether guidebooks, memoirs, novels and short stories, or tourist ephemera, including photographs, travel posters, and luggage labels—act as a textual Claude glass, framing and mediating the sight according to

2 Gilpin, William. Observations on Several Parts of Great Britain, Particularly the High-Lands of Scotland, relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty, made in the year 1776. Vol 1. Blamire: London, 1789. 3 I use the pronoun “his” purposefully because at this time tourists were typically male. 3

picturesque aesthetics. To that end, this dissertation explores the interstices of text, tourism, and visual culture throughout the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

In the early decades of the nineteenth century, as Napoleon’s reign drew to a close, Europe—and the views the Continent offered—was finally opening up. After decades of restrictions barring travel to Europe, British citizens began touring the

Continent en masse, and, to a large extent these tourists merely picked up where the previous generation of Grand Tourists had left off. The Grand Tour had been the purview and rite of passage of aristocratic young men. The tour was designed to finish education, polish manners, and establish social connections and influence within

Europe’s royal courts. By the 1830s, a middle class was emerging in Great Britain, and, aided with disposable income and leisure time, as well as advancements in transportation—including Napoleon’s road system, steamships, and, soon, the railway— these new tourists were eager to see Europe for themselves, signaling a definitive shift away from the aristocratic Grand Tour.

The increasing democratization of travel was the catalyst of the modern tourist industry. As European travel became more popular with both the British and the

American middle-class, the demand for travel-related literature was met by a plethora of travel how-to guides, travel memoirs, and novels about traveling. Many scholars of nineteenth century tourism, including Paul Fussell and James Buzard, have focused on the dichotomy of travel verses tourism, a hierarchy that is, more often than not, based in class. Rather than survey the discursive differences between travellers4 and tourists, or even anti-tourists, I am more interested in questioning how both groups see and how they

4 In order to maintain consistency in spelling between my work and primary texts, as well as international scholars, I use the British spelling of traveller, rather than the Americanized traveler. 4

are taught to see by the texts they read, along with the representations and functions of sight-seeing from the early-nineteenth century, when Continental travel became commonplace, to the outbreak of the First World War when travel was again restricted.

The Semiotics of Tourism

The theories of tourism are as intertextual as the travel writing I discuss, with each theorist taking up and/or taking issue with earlier theories. One of the first critical approaches to tourism is Daniel Boorstin’s short essay “The Lost Art of Travel,” which is part of his larger project The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (1961).

Boorstin presents tourism as a post-modern quest for inauthenticity, or what he terms

“pseudo-events,” that is, events that enable tourists to feel as though they have experienced cultural authenticity without discomfort. Pseudo-events include spectacles produced specifically for tourists, but may also be any stereotypical experience that the tourist reads as authentic:

The tourist looks for caricature…The tourist seldom likes the authentic (to

him often unintelligible) product of a foreign culture; he prefers his own

provincial expectations. The French chanteuse singing English with a

French accent seems more charmingly French than one who simply sings

in French. (106)

Boorstin argues that tourists are not travellers at all, but are only searching for inauthentic experiences. In Boorstin’s view, tourism, specifically tourism of the mid-twentieth century, is inferior to travel or exploration.

In The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class, Dean MacCannell follows a similar argument, seeing tourism as an effect of modernity (and post-modernity), claiming that tourism is “a way of attempting to overcome the discontinuity of modernity, of incorporating its fragments into unified experience” (13). MacCannell is less interested in making value judgments about tourism; instead, he attempts to get at the heart of how sights are established and how they are then sought and seen. Breaking with Boorstin,

MacCannell writes:

The modern critique of tourists is not an analytical reflection on the

problem of tourism—it is part of the problem. Tourists are not criticized

by Boorstin and others for leaving home to see sights. They are

reproached for being satisfied with superficial experiences of other people

and other places. (10)

Though MacCannell takes a similarly negative view of touristic practices, his contribution is towards an analysis of how superficial experiences are produced.

MacCannell presents a Marxist model of tourism in which sights are commodities for tourist consumption. He outlines a five-step process called “sight sacralization” (44), through which an ordinary object or place becomes an object for tourism; this includes:

“the naming phase, framing and evaluation phase, enshrinement, mechanical reproduction, and social reproduction” (45). MacCannell writes, “The first stage of sight sacralization takes place when the sight is marked off from similar objects as worthy for preservation. The stage may be arrived at deductively from the model of attraction:

[tourist/ sight/ marker]” (44, emphasis original). According to this model, the marker creates the fetish or attraction which draws the tourist to the sight. MacCannell adds:

“Markers may take many different forms: guidebooks, informational tablets, slide shows, travelogues, souvenir matchbooks, etc.” (41). In other words, the texts and ephemera of tourism encourage the commodification and consumption of sights, including the often superficial representations of places and cultures.

Both John Urry and Jonathan Culler draw extensively on MacCannell’s ideas of tourist markers (i.e. guidebooks) and tourist consumption (i.e. sight-seeing). Since its publication in 1990, Urry’s book The Tourist Gaze has emerged as perhaps the most influential study of tourism. Modeled on Michel Foucault’s Birth of the Clinic,5 the

“tourist gaze” encapsulates the ways in which tourists visually consume sights, and the power/knowledge dynamic at the heart of sight-seeing. Urry writes:

When we ‘go away’ we look at the environment with interest and

curiosity…In other words, we gaze at what we encounter. And the gaze is

a socially organized and systematized as is the gaze of the [Foucault’s]

medic…there are in fact many professional experts who help to construct

and develop our gaze as tourists. (1)

Urry is not always clear in exactly how the tourist gaze functions according to the medic model, but Daniel C. Knudsen, Anne K. Soper, and Michelle M. Metro-Roland provide the analogous framework that Urry fails to articulate: “In Urry’s conceptualization,

Foucault’s doctor is replaced by the tour guide who directs the gaze of the tourists and

5 Drawing on Foucault, Urry writes, “[A]t least a part of that experience [of pleasurable tourism] is to gaze upon or view a set of different scenes, of landscapes or townscapes which are out of the ordinary” (1). Recent scholars have debated how successful his project really is in placing tourism within the power/knowledge structure. Knudsen, Soper, and Metro-Roland try to fill in some of the gaps, while Marie- Franҫoise Lanfant finds Urry’s efforts unsatisfactory. Instead, Lanfant calls for a return to the phenomenology of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty, and Foucault himself (241-243). Urry has since published a revised edition of The Tourist Gaze (2002) and The Tourist Gaze 3.0 (2011) in order to resolve some of the conflicts without his text as well as addressing issues that have arising from the use of technology in tourism. 7

tells them how to interpret a given sight, while the patients are replaced by the inhabitants and sights of the host country” (3). By this analogy, the tour guide—or the text-as-guide, for the purposes of my argument—points out local sights as abnormal or exotic objects that can be categorized and ordered. Urry argues that these exoticized sights are commodified for consumption by the tourist gaze. Thus, these sights become spectacles produced for the sake of consumption, and tourists are attracted to these spectacles by the anticipation produced via markers: “Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation… constructed and sustained through a variety of non-tourist practices, such as film, TV, literature, magazines, records and videos, which construct and reinforce the gaze” (Urry 3).

The tourist today—that is, the subject of almost all current theories of tourism—is exposed to any number of touristic media; however, for the tourist of the Victorian and

Edwardian eras, these signs were constructed almost entirely by printed texts, either in the form of guidebooks and travel literature or, by the mid-nineteenth century, tourist ephemera. These texts instructed the tourists to maintain a safe distance between themselves and the people and cultures they gazed upon, all the while aestheticizing poverty and decay. I call this the “picturesque gaze,” refiguring Urry’s term “the tourist gaze,” which encompasses the sense of artificiality and visual spectacle, but does not include the historical or literary connotations that my terminology adds.

For Jonathan Culler, the arguments about authenticity and artificiality are as tired as the traveller verses tourist debate. Culler begins his essay “The Semiotics of Tourism” with an attack on Boorstin, whose “discussion of tourism is not untypical of what passes for cultural criticism: complaints about the tawdriness of artificiality of modern culture

which do not attempt to account for the curious facts they rail against and offer little explanation of the cultural mechanisms that might be responsible for them” (154).

Instead, Culler claims that tourists are seeking the authentic, or at least markers which they believe direct them towards authentic experiences:

All over the world, the unsung armies of semiotics, the tourists, are

fanning out in search of signs of Frenchness, typical Italian behavior,

exemplary Oriental6 scenes, typical American thruways, traditional

English pubs…In their most specifically tourist behavior…tourists are the

agents of semiotics: all over the world they are engaged in reading cities,

landscapes and cultures as sign systems. (155)

Tourists, then, see a sign—an accumulation of pre-conceived ideas. In this way, tourists are never quite experiencing a place or site; instead, it would be more accurate to say they are “sign-seeing,” a term I will use to discuss the relationship between semiotics and textual mediation.

In many ways, I hope my own project will be a continuation of Culler’s, an investigation of how the sign system is constructed. What are tourists literally reading when they read cities? What are tourists reading for when they read landscapes? The literature and ephemera of tourism construct a chain of signifiers, but I want to push semiotics one step further, arguing that these are largely signs of the picturesque; that is, the semiotic structure of tourism has its very foundation in picturesque aesthetics. I cannot think of any quote or theorist that better crystallizes my argument than Samuel

Taylor Coleridge’s definition of the picturesque as: “When the parts by their harmony produce an effect of a whole, but there is no seen form of a whole producing or

6 Culler seems to use this term unselfconsciously. 9

explaining the parts, i.e. when the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt” (324). Tourists could see a dilapidated church or poor children playing in Italian streets and feel as if they had experienced the picturesque or had a meaningful encounter with the “real Italy.”

Italy and the Construction of Tourist Space

Because Italy was the primary destination of the Victorian Grand Tour, I have chosen to focus my research there, or rather, on British and American tourists in Italy, with some forays into Egypt and Morocco. There were many reasons for tourists to make the long journey to Italy. For some, like Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, it was the warmer climate and promise of improved health over England’s long, dreary winters.

For Lord Byron and others, it was the adventure and romance of fighting for Italian independence from tyranny. For most tourists, there were two main reasons why Italy featured prominently on every itinerary: first, Italy had the abundance of art and antiquities, and, second, Italy represented all that was quintessentially picturesque.

In the tourist imagination, to travel to Italy was to travel back in time to a pre- industrial land populated with unsophisticated, even primitive, peoples. With its crumbling buildings and Classical ruins, Italy leant itself particularly well to picturesque aesthetics, extending to include even the urban landscape, where the grandeur of the past could still be seen amidst the decay. With its ancient castles and ragged mountains, Italy was the ideal wild, natural terrain that England lacked in the post-Enclosure Act era, when even the rural landscape of Britain was increasingly industrialized. “Italy,” James

Buzard writes, “possessed the greatest concentration of the valuably different in Europe,

the greatest density of Europeanness” (32). That is, in Culler’s terms, Italy is the country where tourists could find the most affective signs, or, returning to Urry’s Foucauldian model, these are the scenes that the writer-as-guide could exhibit as the most unusual, exotic, or visibly different sights in Europe.

As a consequence, travel writers, novelists, art critics, and aesthetes sought to leave no stone unturned, producing a profusion of guides, essays, memoirs, and fiction about Italy. Everyone who travelled to Italy read about the art and culture, either in travel writing, guidebooks, or poetry. Manfred Pfister writes, “The Italy for which the traveller sets out is never a tabula rasa but always already inscribed with the traces of previous texts” (6, emphasis original). This is not, however, a study of Italy, or even necessarily of representations of Italy, but rather of how textual representation itself operates within tourism.

These texts promote and perpetuate picturesque sight-seeing. The power of the picturesque is that it separates the tourist from the object of the gaze; it forecloses the possibility of seeing beyond a construction of Italy as a museum or Italians as anything other than stereotypes. To employ Michel de Certeau’s definition of space as “practiced place”7 (117), these texts transform Italy from a place where Italians live and work into a touristic space of sight-seeing. However, tourism is not just about the touristic practices of reading the guidebook and checking off sights; it is also about how places are imagined and represented. Here I build on Christian Jacob’s8 definition of “imaginative

7 From The Practice of Everyday Life: “In short, space is a practiced place. Thus, the street geometrically defined by urban planning is transformed into a space by walkers. In the same way, an act of reading is the space produced by the practice of a particular place: a written text, i.e., a space constituted by a system of signs” (Certeau 117). 8 As Chloe Chard points out, Jacob is building his definition of “imaginative geography” upon Edward Said’s discussion in Orientalism. Said, who in turn is building upon Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, writes, “There is no doubt that imaginative geography and history help the mind to intensify its own 11

geography,” that is, a “space of privileged projection for desires, aspirations, affective memory, and the cultural memory of the subject” (qtd. in Chard 10). Italy, as imagined by Victorian and Edwardian tourists, is a palimpsest of history and aesthetics, which is viewed from a position of privilege that is economic and social, but also literal—the picturesque, after all, depends upon an elevated and panoptic vantage point to accommodate the most favorable views. From this position, tourists can project their desires and cultural memories upon the landscape or the people which inhabit it, as when

Amelia Edwards writes in A Thousand Miles up the Nile, “It is all so picturesque, indeed so biblical” (288). Tourists (re)order the landscape into pre-defined categories, distances, perspectives, or narratives.

A Note on Structure

I have structured my chapters according to genre, devoting a chapter each to guidebooks, travelogues, fiction, and ephemera. This will allow me to discuss conventions of each genre in turn, thus developing a corresponding thematic structure that illuminates the differences, and similarities, between various types of travel writing.

This genre-centric method also provides a rough chronological structure. Murray’s

Handbook for Travellers, first published in the late 1830s, is among the earliest texts in my archive. While the travel memoirs of Charles Dickens and Amelia Edwards are mid- nineteenth-century texts that respond to earlier travel guides. These texts are followed by

sense of itself by dramatizing the distance and difference between what is close to it and what is far away” (55). That is to say, Said’s “imaginative geography,” like picturesque aesthetics, depends upon proximity and distance. Said uses the phrase to explain the construction of an “our land—barbarian land” (54) dichotomy, in which imaginary boundaries are drawn and differences established, while these boundaries and differences are not necessarily mutually agreed upon. I use Jacob’s definition of “imaginative geographies,” via Chard’s translation, because it speaks more to my own understanding of the imaginative qualities attributed to a tourist destination or site. 12

the travelogues of James, Vernon Lee, and others published around the mid- to late- nineteenth century. The travel fiction in my third chapter overlaps chronologically with the travelogues, but reaches further into the early twentieth century with E. M. Forster’s

Edwardian fiction. Finally, the ephemera discussed in the last chapter are products of advancements in technology in the late nineteenth century, but reached the end of the

“golden age” at the start of the First World War.

In Chapter 1, I examine the Italian travel guides of John Murray, Karl Baedeker, and John Ruskin. Guidebooks are usually discussed in histories of tourism, but not often included within the broad umbrella term of “travel literature.” Instead, I present a close reading of guidebooks as texts with specific genre conventions and rhetorical devices.

This chapter scrutinizes the ways in which guidebooks establish signs by informing tourists of what they should see and the appropriate level of enthusiasm they should feel for each sight. All of these texts, including Ruskin’s, provide itineraries that direct tourists toward a particular sight and past others. These itineraries, along with the star- system developed by Baedeker, tell tourists which sights are culturally valuable. If the purpose of the Grand Tour was to finish the young aristocrat’s education and polish his manners, the goal of the mass tourist is to check off the sights catalogued in the guidebook. Only by assiduously checking off these sights could the tourist boast that he or she had thoroughly “done Italy.”

I consider the history and development of guidebooks, beginning with the texts most popular with the Grand Tourists of the late eighteenth century in order to show the relationship between picturesque aesthetics and the development of the guidebook for mass tourists. Then, I take a closer look at the ways in which guidebooks become and

remain the authorities on cultural value by presenting an encyclopedic breadth of information in the most precise and objective terms possible. Finally, I turn to John

Ruskin’s guidebook, Mornings in Florence, which he wrote as a response to Murray’s guidebooks, which he felt were not only inaccurate, but encouraged superficial tourists who were “glad to learn so much without looking” (10).

In Chapter 2, I examine travelogues of the nineteenth century, which are often criticized as overly subjective, sentimental, and unoriginal; instead, I consider travel writing as a response to the precise, pedantic tone of the guidebook, as well as a means of originality in an overly-textualized market. Reading travel narratives by Charles Dickens,

Amelia Edwards, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Vernon Lee, Edith Wharton, Henry James, and Lilian Bell, I describe, first, how travel writers move away from frequent deferrals to the authority of Ruskin or Murray, towards an outright rejection of the guidebooks.

Instead, travel writers counter the authority of guidebooks by stressing their own subjectivity.

Second, just as travel writers increasingly criticize guidebooks, a few of these texts also reveal a growing rejection of the picturesque as the nineteenth century draws to a close. The travel writers discussed in this chapter criticize the conventions of the picturesque, revealing its faults and painstakingly deconstructing its aesthetics. In many ways, however, the conventions of the travel narrative become as powerful as those of the guidebook in controlling touristic practices and expectations. Following the work of A.V.

Seaton, I look at the ways in which these travelogues promote particular roles for tourists to perform.

This chapter also marks a departure from most scholarship about travel writing.

The canon of travel writing, as with most canons, is almost exclusively male. Scholars tend to approach men’s writing critically and theoretically, while women travel writers are most often discussed biographically and historically as women, or relegated to short introductions in niche anthologies. Instead, I approach women travel writers, not as separate, but as engaged in the same intertextual discourses of aesthetics and tourism as their male counterparts.

In Chapter 3, I examine the practices and tropes of tourism in Victorian and

Edwardian novels. Both Dickens’s Little Dorrit and George Eliot’s Middlemarch feature a range of tourist types, from Mrs. General and Mr. Casaubon, who are incapable of forming their own opinions, to the unhappy, unenthusiastic heroines Amy Dorrit and

Dorothea Casaubon (née Brooke). In contrast, Isabel Archer in James’s The Portrait of a

Lady loves visiting new places and having new experiences. Despite her enthusiasm for seeing all the sights around her, she fails to see her husband’s affair with Madame Merle.

Drawing connections between his fiction and travel writing, I look at the ways in which

James’s novel shows his life-long engagement with tourism. I then move to a discussion of the Italian fiction of E.M. Forster, who also spent a career critiquing touristic practices in the early twentieth century. As with Chapter 2, this third chapter shows how novels such as Where Angels Fear to Tread and A Room with a View deconstruct the picturesque by bringing the tourist into direct contact with Italians. This chapter pulls together several narrative arcs running through my dissertation, emphasizing the ways in which the literature of travel mediates the tourist’s experience, as well as the issues which arise when tourists become writers themselves.

Chapter 4 shifts from a discussion of visual culture through texts to focus on the material artifacts of visual culture: the images and ephemera of tourism, including photographs, posters, and luggage labels. The photograph developed simultaneously with the travel guide, and like guidebooks, photography and other types of travel ephemera were informed by the picturesque. Some photographers, such as Henry Fox Talbot, often followed Gilpin’s picturesque perspective.9 Thomas Cook’s early posters feature a solitary, peripatetic traveller amidst looming mountains. As the century progressed and

British tourists reached beyond Europe, mountains were replaced by pyramids as the picturesque was superimposed over altogether different landscapes. Similarly, luggage labels of the mid-nineteenth century featured etchings of the hotel nestled within a picturesque landscape. As grand hotels were established in Egypt, India, and Turkey, the hotels featured stereotypical signs of cultures and races. To my great surprise, I have found very little critical engagement whatsoever in the ephemeral material culture of tourism, and I hope to take the first steps toward a rich, original, and exciting exploration within a largely untouched field.

The coda begins with a case study of a single tourist, the American socialite

Isabel Stewart Gardner, who was a close friend of James and a model for several of his characters. Throughout Gardner’s many trips around the world, she kept extensive scrapbooks filled with ephemera, notes on her itinerary, and quotes taken directly from her many travel texts. This case study demonstrates how a single tourist experienced the intersections of tourism, text, and ephemera. Finally, I bring my dissertation to a close by

9 See Green-Lewis, Jennifer. “Already the past: The Backwards Glance of Victorian Photography.” English Language Notes. 44.2 (2006): 25 – 42.

presenting theories and evidence about what happened to the picturesque as it finally slipped from popular usage among tourists and travel writers.

Although the chronology of my research is situated later than Doctor Syntax, our themes are largely the same. Each of the texts discussed here deals in some way with tourism that is born out of the visual aesthetics of the picturesque, the inevitability of seeing sights that are always mediated through prior texts, and the anxieties and complexities of (re)producing texts and images in an already saturated discourse. In turn, these texts and images act as a metaphorical Claude glass through which the tourist views the world, maintaining a safe, aesthetic distance from the object of the picturesque gaze.

My work here traces the scopic preoccupations of tourism, along with tourism’s evolving definitions of the picturesque. Put simply, I am looking for the picturesque throughout the nineteenth century.

Chapter 1

“Glad to learn so much without looking”: Aesthetics and Semiotics of Guidebooks

Without looking about you at all, you may find, in your Murray, the useful

information that [Santa Croce] is a church which ‘consists of a very wide

nave and lateral aisles, separated by seven fine pointed arches.’ And…you

will be—under ordinary conditions of tourist hurry—glad to learn so

much without looking... (Ruskin, Mornings in Florence 10)

By the time John Ruskin wrote Mornings in Florence in 1877, the accusations against tourists were far more serious than simply that they were in a constant state of

“tourist hurry.” Ruskin’s guidebooks and travel writings are overtly laced with a class consciousness that presents the traveller as more educated, wealthy, and of a higher class than the majority of mere tourists, who lack the financial and social connections to travel in style from one European capital to another, as eighteenth-century Grand Tourists had done. This dichotomy has been at the center of research on tourism for decades, thanks in part to foundational texts such as Daniel Boorstin’s “The Lost Art of Travel” and Paul

Fussell’s Abroad: Literary Traveling between the Wars, both of which locate the difference between travel and tourism, not within class, but within a chronological framework. Fussell explains: “Before tourism there was travel, and before travel there was exploration…What we recognize as tourism in its contemporary form was making inroads on travel as early as the mid-nineteenth century, when Thomas Cook got the bright idea of shipping sight-seeing groups to the Continent” (38). Thomas Cook’s package tours, marketed as Cook’s Tours, took advantage of cheaper, faster, and more comfortable modes of transport, contributing to the democratization of travel and

initiating a new wave of middle-class “tourists” who were viewed in direct opposition to the “traveller” of an earlier era and higher socio-economic status. Fussell writes, “From the outset mass tourism attracted the class-contempt of killjoys who conceived themselves independent travelers and thus superior by reason of intellect, education, curiosity, and spirit” (40). These attributes, particularly education, were believed to irrefutably bind higher class to authentic travel, rather than mass tourism, by defining how the traveller experienced, understood, and saw the place and culture he or she visited.

In contrast, the “tourist,” according to James Buzard, “is the dupe of fashion, blindly following where authentic travellers have gone with open eyes and free spirits”

(Beaten Track 1), echoing Ruskin’s criticism of those who are “glad to learn so much without looking” (Mornings in Florence 10). The language used is noticeably optical, befitting a cultural practice that is predominately visual. We think of increased mobility in the nineteenth century as improvements in the process of moving people from one location to another, but the literature is clear: tourism is more accurately the transporting of pairs of eyes, or at best, spectators and subjective observers. Yet, critics say that tourists fail to see the Europe that travellers experience with authenticity and originality, looking instead for signs of what is essentially European or Italian. Tourists are either reading their guidebooks to the point that they fail to see the sight/site, as Ruskin claims, or they are reading the sight for signs, acting as Culler’s “agents of semiotics” (155).

While Ruskin promises his readers a guide to “what they ought preferably to study,” the preface of Murray’s 1838 Handbook for Travellers on the Continent reads:

“The writer of [this] Handbook has endeavoured to confine himself to matter-of-fact

descriptions of what ought to be seen at each place, and is calculated to interest an intelligent English traveller, without bewildering his readers with an account of all that may be seen” (n. pag., emphasis original). Regardless of class motivations or stereotypical rapidity, both Ruskin and Murray, along with Baedeker and other guidebooks, situate their discourse around sight, castigating the tourists’ failure to see while promising a comprehensive, authoritative guide to seeing. Guidebooks establish their respective reputations as cultural authorities and promote tourism based on Gilpin’s definitions of the picturesque—that is, tourism that is optical, semiotic, and, in many cases, involves only inauthentic and non-experiential “sign-seeing.” These guidebooks provide readers with itineraries, star-systems, and other mechanisms for finding, seeing, and checking-off signs of the picturesque, illuminating the complex relationships between the guidebooks’ authority, mechanisms of commodification, and, of course, the visual aesthetics and semiotic structures at the core of sight-seeing.

Before the Guidebook: The Texts and Aesthetics of Tourism, 1749 - 1836

Though John Murray’s Handbooks were the first travel guides for the new era of tourism, the Grand Tourist also relied heavily on texts, from the works of Virgil and

Horace, to the poetry of Byron, to a few texts that were written specifically for tourists’ use. Examining the literature that was popular with Grand Tourists provides a sense of continuity, and, in some cases, discontinuity, with the guidebooks that came later. Indeed, many of the practices that we associate with mass tourism were already in place by the mid-eighteenth century. In 1749, John Nugent published his guide, known simply as The

Grand Tour,10 providing several volumes of helpful instruction to members of the upper- class whilst on their Continental travels. The entire third volume of Nugent’s comprehensive guide is devoted to Italy and includes surveys of topography, a discussion of soil fertility, and descriptions of each republic, kingdom, and dominion of pre-Il

Risorgimento Italy,11 as well as the “The Ecclesiastic State” (27). Nugent also goes to great length to describe the character and customs of Italians, perpetuating many of the stereotypes that permeate tourism in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Nugent writes of Italians, “Their predominant passions are jealousy and revenge, which are the source of an infinite deal of mischief…They are too much addicted to pleasure and idleness, and extravagantly violent in their amours” (43). Despite his prejudice against

Italians, Nugent finds sufficient value in Italy to warrant an entire volume of his four- volume guide, owing to Italy’s primacy in the Grand Tour, as well as Nugent’s claims that “There is no country in Europe where travelling is attended with so much pleasure and improvement than Italy” (60). Like countless later guidebooks, Nugent’s The Grand

Tour establishes detailed paths for aristocratic travellers to follow and prejudices to hold, as well as a precedent for guides to give lengthy introductions and explanatory chapters.

Unlike later guides, Nugent does not stress the primacy of sight, nor does he even mention the picturesque because, of course, Nugent is writing some twenty-five years before Gilpin journey’s along the Wye and across Great Britain.

10 The full title for Nugent’s work is THE GRAND TOUR. Containing an Exact DESCRIPTION Of most of the Cities, Towns, and Remarkable Places of EUROPE. Together with A Distinct Account of the Post- Roads and Stages, with their respective Distances, Through Holland, Flanders, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Russia, Poland, Italy, France, Spain, and Portugal. Likewise Directions relating to the Manner and the Expense of Travelling from one Place and Country to another. AS ALSO Occasional Remarks on the present State of Trade, as well as the Liberal Arts and Sciences, in each respective Country. 11 The term Il Risorgimento refers to the reunification movement of the 1850s-60s, culminating in the establishment of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861. The Italian states’ struggles for independence from tyranny and unification captured the British imagination and made the military leader Giuseppe Garibaldi a national hero. Italian unification was still a distant dream at the time of Nugent’s writing. 21

Of the books focusing solely on Italy, John Chetwode Eustace’s A Classical Tour

Through Italy, famously satirized by Charles Dickens in Little Dorrit12, was enormously popular with tourists for decades after its 1813 publication. Like most texts of the pre-

Murray era, Eustace’s book is not a travel guide per se, but more of a travel narrative, describing his own journey and conversations, along with incidental recommendations of inns or cafes. Eustace is writing just at the cusp of mass-tourism, and his guide stands out from most nineteenth-century guidebooks because it is a Classical tour aimed at readers who were likely educated at England’s best public schools or by private tutors, thus they would have read the works of Virgil, Horace, and Milton, from whom Eustace quotes extensively:

The epithet Classical sufficiently points out its peculiar character, which is

to trace the resemblance between Modern and Ancient Italy, and to take

for guides and companions in the beginning of the nineteenth century, the

writers that pre-ceded or adorned the first. Conformably to that character,

the Author may be allowed to dwell with complacency on the incidents of

ancient history, to admit every poetical recollection, and to claim

indulgence, if in describing objects so often alluded to by the Latin

writers, he should frequently borrow their expressions; Materiae scripto

conveniente suae.13 (vi-vii)

Here, and throughout the text, Eustace does not provide translations for his Latin quotations, assuming that any gentleman participating in a Grand Tour would undoubtedly be fluent in the classical languages. Eustace also recommends that the

12 A discussion of Little Dorrit, including Dickens’s critique of Eustace’s A Classical Tour through Italy is included in Chapter 3 of this dissertation. 13 Latin for “Original writing is most convenient.” [rough translation] 22

traveller devote time to study in preparation for a tour abroad, adding that those who seek only idleness or a change of scenery will have no need of preparation or, indeed, of his book; that is, that stereotype of the Grand Tourist as a spoiled, ignorant dandy, going abroad to live lavishly and sow his wild oats, would not need Eustace’s preparation or guidance. The educated and industrious traveller, however, would gain much because:

Italy owes more to history than even to nature; and he who goes over it

merely with his eyes open to its embellishments, and his mind intent on

observation, though he may see much and learn much also, will yet, with

all his curiosity and diligence, discover one-half only of its beauties…by a

longer course of preparation. (3)

By then, tourism was already a visual practice, but for Eustace, the mind—not the eye— is the primary organ for apprehension, which entirely contradicts Dickens’s representations of Eustace as encouraging superficial tourism by those who only “see with someone else’s eyes” (Little Dorrit 473). Having one’s “eyes open” is only part of

Eustace’s requirements for tourists; he understands that keen observation is the primary objective on tour, while reading—that is, establishing signs through the consumption of texts—is the duty of tourists prior to touring. Preparatory reading is as important as sight-seeing, but on the one hand, texts read prior to travel would not come between the tourist and the sight, which sets Eustace apart from later guides, but on the other hand,

Eustace is similarly guilty of promoting copious information as the prerequisite of enjoyment and understanding.

Besides reading widely from classical works of literature and history, Eustace also recommends a lengthy study of Italian:

It is evident that he who wishes to become acquainted with the manners,

or to enjoy the society of the inhabitants of any county, must previously

learn their language; it is not therefore my intention, at present, merely to

recommend, what indeed no traveller entirely neglects, the study of

Italian, but to enforce the necessity of commencing it at a much earlier

period, and of continuing it for a much longer space of time than is now

customary. (xxii, emphasis original)

Eustace actually encourages interactions with Italians, and one can only infer that his views of Italian manners and society must have been somewhat more favorable than those expressed by Nugent. From Ruskin to Forster, the Italians we most often find in literature are beggars, paupers, thieves, and vagrants, certainly not a society worth seeking through arduous study. Thus, while Eustace does openly discuss the optics of tourism much more explicitly than Nugent does, the tourism he promotes is far from the superficial, detached practices that Dickens satirizes.

For later tourists, a knowledge of the local language was certainly no prerequisite for travelling abroad, and Murray’s Handbook for Travellers on the Continent (1849) does not even include an index of common phrases, while Baedeker’s Northern Italy

(1906) has only a page of translations for “ordinary dishes” found in Italy, so that the average English tourist might distinguish his manzo (boiled beef) from his fritto (fried beef) (xxii). Even the most cultured tourist was expected to engage couriers to arrange lodging in advance, rather than studying the local language or dialect of the various regions visited (a nearly impossible task, given the proliferation of regional dialects in pre-Il Risorgimento Italy), and Ruskin remarks in Praeterita that his knowledge of

Italian, despite his time spent there, amounts to little more than a “stutter” (360).

Tourism, despite Eustace’s recommendations, became more often about avoiding the local inhabitants than engaging with them. One vital function of guidebooks was to limit tourists interaction with locals, or at least protect the tourist from being overcharged, as

Baedeker’s preface states, “to render him [the guidebook-tourist] as independent as possible of the services of guides and valets-de-place, to protect him against extortion”

(v).

Tourism and the Byronic Imagination

While Eustace supplies the historical contexts, no one was more influential in shaping Italy in the British imagination than Lord Byron. For years, early tourists used

Byron as their guide, replicating the Romantic journeys of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

(1812). Byron’s publication only preceded Eustace’s by a matter of months, but his poetry immediately superseded Classical texts in popularity, making Eustace instantly anachronistic: the age of the tourist carrying volumes of Virgil had already passed.

Byron’s poetry continued to influence tourists throughout the nineteenth-century, even after the birth of the travel guide. For one thing, Don Juan includes the earliest published14 use of the phrase “guide-book,” in Canto V, LII, where the narrator refuses to describe the landscape:

I won’t describe; description is my forte

But every fool describes in these bright days

14 The earliest published use of term “guide-book” appears in Canto V of Don Juan, published in 1821; however, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first recorded use of the term was in 1814 in the journal of Scottish poet John Mayne. His journal was not published until 1909 when it appeared as The journal of John Mayne, during a tour on the Continent upon its reopening after the fall of Napoleon, 1814. 25

His wond’rous journey to some foreign court,

And spans his quarto, and demands your praise—

Death to his publisher, to him ‘tis sport;

While nature, tortured twenty thousand ways,

Resigns herself with exemplary patience

To guide-books, rhymes, tours, sketches, illustrations.

Don Juan’s refusal to contribute to the further over-textualization of Italy is, in a sense, an attempt to avoid becoming another Dr. Syntax, writing and sketching the landscape into an aesthetic ideal. This stanza could also be read as indicative of Byron’s own decision to fictionalize his travels in verse, rather than writing a guide or personal memoir.

Regardless of whatever intent or hesitations Byron may have had, Don Juan and

Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage were both used as guidebooks, even after Murray’s

Handbooks became ubiquitous. As late as 1863, William Wetmore Story writes in his travelogue Roba di Roma, “Every Englishman…carries a Murray for information, and a

Byron for sentiment, and finds out by them what he is to know and feel at every step”

(qtd. in Buzard 120). Story’s remark shows the extent to which British tourists were spoon-fed experiences. Byron lived an infamously passionate life, filled with intrigue, romance, and adventure. Though his tourist-readers were far removed from that direct experience, his books allowed an imaginary participation in Byronic adventure. This phenomenon is what A. V. Seaton terms “metempsychotic tourism,” in which there is

“explicit role-play through the adoption of a persona from the past and a repetition of at least part of the itinerary taken by the role model” (137). Byron himself, as John Towner

points out, used Goethe’s Italienische Reise as a guide for his travels, as did Percy

Shelley (233).

Nineteenth Century Guidebooks and the Politics of the Picturesque

Textually, picturesque tourism was aided by and mediated through the writings of

Byron, Shelley, and Keats. In The Mediterranean Passion, John Pemble writes, “The

Romantic poets gave the landscape of Claude and Salvator literary equivalents…

Furthermore they invested these landscapes with the power of symbols. By using them as settings for psychological drama they turned them into landscapes of the mind” (9). The

Romantics, then, have textualized the picturesque landscape, allowing the traveler (or proto-tourist) to formulate signs based upon Romantic poetry, so that they might, to paraphrase Coleridge, see the disparate parts but feel the whole of the picturesque (324).

A tourist could, for instance, see a sight that is considered essentially or typically Italian, and from that sight, have the impression of having fully experienced Italy. Coleridge’s understanding of the picturesque—one that is essential to my own argument—is expanded in James Buzard’s book The Beaten Track:

When visitors could say, ‘Yes, that’s Italy’ or ‘that’s Paris’ or even ‘that’s

Europe’—when, in other words, valued signs of these entities gathered

from books, pictures, conversation, and other means of cultural

preparation matched with scenes before them—they could feel they had

achieved meaningful contact with what these places essentially were. (10)

This form of picturesque tourism, which is both a visual and a textual search for signs of what is “essential” or stereotypical, is at the heart of guidebook-directed mass-tourism.

The guidebook model of the picturesque gaze distances the tourist from an authentic experience or knowledge of the people who live in tourist destinations.

Travelling for purely aesthetic pleasure arguably closes tourists off from more meaningful experiences and blinds tourists to the social realities of local populations.

Ignoring the literal conditions of life is essential to constructing touristic space, supporting the tendency among tourists to think of countries rather as museums full of artifacts and quaint spectacles of stereotypical, rustic behavior.

In essence, this is what the guidebook is for: it comforts and protects the tourist, while making the world seem intelligible and orderly. Tourism, be it through guidebooks or packaged tours, is structured in such a way as to avoid contact with scenes that are unfamiliar or “foreign”; tourists can travel abroad without having their opinions challenged. According to Fussell, “Tourism sooths you by comfort and familiarity and shields you from the shock of novelty and oddity. It confirms your prior view of the world instead of shaking it up. Tourism requires that you see conventional things and that you see them in a conventional way” (651). The role of guidebooks is to translate the foreign into the familiar by directing the tourist to an easily recognizable version—that is, a sign—of the site.

As the picturesque gaze was adopted by mass-tourism, it evolved from an artistic appreciation based upon rules and formulae to a practice of merely seeing without fully engaging intellectually. Buzard is correct when he argues that, “[The] Picturesque had by the mid-century become involved in a different way of figuring the distinction between

‘travellers’ and ‘tourists’, according to which the picturesque and pictorial were signs of a superficial and imitative (touristic) attitude” (192). Again, the dichotomy of “traveller”

and “tourist” continues to have its basis within the Victorian class structure, pitting the aristocratic traveler against the middle-class tourist. The picturesque was, according to

Sidney K. Robinson, “democratic” (29) because “The equality of sensory apparatus was set against the learning and cultivation required by a theory of beauty based on classical rules. The picturesque reliance on sensory stimulus can be judged unintellectual because it apparently requires no thought to understand, only an eyeblink response” (29). There was, of course, a history and discourse of the picturesque, including the formulae described by Gilpin, but as time went on, the theory of the picturesque was almost entirely forgotten in the guidebook practice of picturesque sight-seeing.

As Ann Bermingham explains, the picturesque was not entirely democratic, but it was always highly politicized: “All signs of picturesque nature lead to politics…in eighteenth century Britain, landscape—even the picturesque landscape—was a mode of political discourse” (77). Bermingham’s approaches the picturesque by way of landscape architecture and the contrasting philosophies of design promoted by “Capability” Brown and Uvedale Price. Brown’s gardens were highly structured and formulaic: rivers were rerouted, and entire hills were removed. In effect, the landscape was rebuilt according to aesthetic fashion, rather than aesthetics being influenced by the landscape, or put more simply: life imitated art. Contrastingly, Price favored a more natural appearance, with as little intervention as possible. This version of the picturesque garden is more in keeping with Mr. Darcy’s gardens in Jane Austen’s novel Pride and Prejudice. Elizabeth Bennet praises the grounds at Pemberley as “a place where natural beauty has been so little counteracted by an awkward taste” (163). Darcy’s estate is a reflection of his character,

while Price’s own description of landscape design is informed by his political persuasions:

A good landscape is that in which all the parts are free and unconstrained,

but in which, though some are prominent and highly illuminated, and

others in shade or retirement…yet they are all necessary to the beauty,

energy, effect, and harmony of the whole. I do not see how good

government can be more exactly defined. (558)

For Price, Brown’s flattening of the landscape was analogous to the flattening of the social order—a move towards democracy, or even anarchy. As Bermingham puts it, “the picturesque with its variety, individuality, and antiquity was comparable to the British

Constitution’s slow and natural evolution as opposed to the Brownian garden or the violent imposition of the abstract principles of the Rights of Man” (86). The picturesque represents something of the old, aristocratic order, much in the way the Grand Tour does, and, like the Grand Tour, the picturesque was met with the same democratizing force— the guidebook.

Selling Signs: Murray, Baedeker, and the Commodification of Tourism

While nineteenth-century tourists differed greatly from their Grand Tourist predecessors, Italy remained a land of images created in part by Romantic poets, yet the texts mediating those images were quickly changing. The preface to Murray’s 1838

Handbook for Travellers on the Continent reads: “The writer of [this] Handbook has endeavoured to confine himself to matter-of-fact descriptions of what ought to be seen at each place, and is calculated to interest an intelligent English traveller, without

bewildering his readers with an account of all that may be seen” (n. pag.). The claim of this statement goes beyond the intrinsically visual nature of tourism: travel no longer needs to be uncomfortable, overwhelming, or bewildering because Murray is the cultural authority on which sights are worthy of the tourists’ notice and which sights are not. This authority was largely established through the guidebooks’ claims of objectivity, their detailed itineraries, and, most importantly, their practice of assigning stars to sights of particular interest.

The guidebooks of both Murray and Baedeker include introductory chapters that provide tourists with all of the practical information for traveling, including currency conversion rates, histories of art, and advice and instruction for sending telegrams, buying stamps, booking hotels, and arranging tickets for trains, boats, and even the opera.

The encyclopedic breadth of the guidebooks’ knowledge—the 1906 edition of

Baedeker’s Northern Italy includes over sixty pages of such information—earned both guides the reputation of being comprehensive and objective authorities. Murray’s handbooks were continually revised in order to ensure that only information that was directly useful to the touring public would be included. Murray’s 1860 edition of

Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy informs the reader:

The new edition of this Handbook has be reissued with a view of making

it a guide to the most remarkable places of Northern Italy, and drawing the

attention of the traveller to the objects best worthy of being noticed.

Reflections not contributing to this end have been excluded: those who

desire remarks upon Italy can find books containing them in plenty, from

Forsyth down to the latest modern tourist. (ix)

Despite Murray’s efforts to maintain objectivity, authority, and, most importantly, supremacy within the guidebook market, the introduction of Baedeker’s guides superseded Murray’s claims. To avoid any appearance of subjectivity, Baedeker refrained from description or narrative, and to prove his credentials as reliable and unbiased, the editor addresses not only tourists, but the tourist industry directly: “To hotel-proprietors, tradesmen, and others, the Editor begs to intimate that a character for fair dealing and courtesy towards travellers is the sole passport to his recommendation, and that advertisements of every kind are strictly excluded from his Handbooks” (vi). By refusing to accept advertisements, Baedeker presents his guides as being wholly unbiased in their recommendations and dedicated only to the task of ensuring that those tourists carrying a red Baedeker have the best possible experience while abroad. At the same time, Baedeker was setting himself apart from Murray, who includes dozens of pages of advertisements at the front and back of his handbooks for everything from hotels to Fry’s

Cocoa Powder.

Also included in the introductory chapters of the guidebooks are the itineraries, which were largely responsible for creating the “normal conditions of tourist hurry” that

Ruskin critiques. As well as outlining fixed routes between popular destinations,

Murray’s Handbooks calculate the duration of travel between major cities to the exactitude of half an hour and discourage tourists from straying too far from the normal routes for fear of danger and/or extortion. If Murray and Baedeker are seen as authorities of culture, then the itineraries they outline imbue the tourist with a sense of each city’s cultural value. For instance, the 1906 edition of Baedeker’s Northern Italy allowed for 2

½ days for seeing Milan with excursions to local villages, while tourists were to spend

one day in Padua before traveling to Venice. Venice was worthy of a four day stay, while

Florence deserved five days. Cities not included in the itinerary were naturally perceived as not possessing sufficient sites of value to warrant a visit.

For most tourists, itineraries made planning and scheduling trips much easier, with fewer decisions to make and nothing left to chance. For guidebook editors, itineraries emphasized both their precision and authority. Buzard explains that, “The arithmetical allotting of cultural time contributed to the guidebooks’ authority as arbiters of cultural value and assisted critics in their figuring of ‘the tourist’ as the consciousness perfectly obedient to institutional directives” (Beaten Track 287). Buzard’s description highlights the direct correlation between authority and obedience: the more authoritative guidebooks became, the more obedient the tourists, and the more passionate anti-tourist sentiment grew.

The guidebook itinerary had not always been so structured and regimental.

Murray’s 1853 Handbook to Travellers on the Continent included several pages of complicated, nearly illegible charts called “Skeleton Tours,” given for any and all popular or possible routes through Europe. These itineraries were meant to give tourists an idea of how many hours—exclusive of stops—it might take one to travel from London to destinations abroad: for instance, 38 hours from London to Frankfurt, not including overnight stays or any other delays, then 3 more hours to Munich, etc. But the actual sojourn in Munich is given simply as “several weeks” (xxxiv). Specifics are left up to the tourist to decide. Likewise, the 1870 edition of Baedeker’s Italy: Northern Italy and

Corsica, the “Period and Plan of Tour” simply states “The season selected, and the duration of the tour determined on must of course depend on the traveller himself” (xii).

There is very little indication of the length of stay in each city or the time required to travel between cities. While this edition does include instructions on using “locomotion,” transport by carriage is still described along many popular routes, particularly through mountainous regions, making it more difficult to estimate journeys. There are also preliminary guides and detailed maps of Avignon, Nice, Marseilles, and other cities where tourists might spend a few days on their journey between England and Italy.

Contrastingly, while Murray’s 1891 Handbook for Travellers in Northern Italy still includes “Skeleton Tours,” these are now presented in the form of four itineraries ranging from traditionally extensive three-month tours to shorter, three-week holidays better suited to middle-class working professionals. Now, each itinerary is easy to read and understand. Travel time and length of stay are both included, with three days in

Venice, one in Padua, one day for Verona to Mantua (18), etc. This form became the standard for handbooks and is virtually identical to the 1906 edition of Baedeker’s

Northern Italy discussed above. While Baedeker includes newer methods of transportation such as “Cycling and Motoring” (xix), the 1906 edition gives only one itinerary for a circular tour, calculated to the half day, and introductory remarks reading,

“The following short itinerary, beginning and ending at Milan, though very far from exhausting the beauties of North Italy, includes most of the places usually visited, and the time required for a glimpse of each” (xiii). Baedeker’s use of “glimpse,” along with its strict itineraries, caries strong implications that Baedeker’s brand of tourism was not only visually-oriented, but also superficial and hurried.

Star-Systems and the Codification of Cultural Value

Perhaps the most lasting contribution to the guidebook structure, even more influential than guidebooks’ itineraries, is the practice of assigning stars or asterisks to sites deemed particularly worthy of tourists’ attention. Baedeker is usually credited with devising the star-system; however, a similar practice was initiated by Mariana Starke in her 1824 Travels on the Continent, which is in part a description of her own travels, and partially a laundry list of places tourists should visit. Rather than the stars or asterisks of later guidebooks, Starke uses exclamation points to mark sights of interest, and it would be easy for unfamiliar readers to mistake the practice for great enthusiasm when she describes a museum’s collection as including “Egyptian divinity, in alabaster!!!...bust of

Venus!!” (8). Though Starke also frequently points out “picturesque prospects” (7) or the

“picturesque ruins of an ancient castle” (37), her guide offers little of aesthetic interest outside of her exclamatory system. It was Karl Baedeker who adopted Starke’s practice, though instead of exclamation points, Baedeker chose less ambiguous asterisks. It was his star-system which was soon adopted by Murray and is still used in guidebooks today.

Like the itineraries, a star (or lack thereof) alerted tourists of the appropriate level of appreciation each site should inspire. Unlike the introductory chapters that instructed tourists in the practical matters of how to travel, the star-system determined what the tourist would actually see, do, and even feel in each city. Consequently, the star-system became a type of tourists’ checklist, informing sight-seers of what should not be missed and assigning cultural value to each site. Graham M.S. Dann explains one negative consequence of the star-system: “followers of the guide felt obliged to check off the asterisked attractions of any given place, since failure to carry out this duty would result

in feelings of eternal frustration”15 (84). Tourists, in other words, began to understand the guidebooks, not in the terms of “what ought to be seen,” but of what must be seen. If a tourist did not visit all of the starred sights, checking each off in turn, he or she could not claim to have properly and thoroughly “done” Europe. On the other hand, as Boorstin points out, the star-system/checklists can also result in “the frustration of having gone to great trouble and expense to see a sight only to discover afterward that it had not even rated a single asterisk” (106). One can only wonder if, in such cases, the tourist’s appreciation of an un-asterisked sight might then retroactively diminish.

There were, of course, the innumerable sights that were not even mentioned in guidebooks. In the early days of travel guides, both Murray and Baedeker asserted that their guides were written from the first-hand, personal experience of the editor who could not be expected to have visited every village or stayed at every hotel. As a consequence, villages and hotels not mentioned in a guidebook were seen as not worth the tourist’s time and money. As Dann explains, “the language of tourism, both in its visual displays and its verbal descriptions, can inform the tourist...not only by what it depicts and says...but also by what it leaves out of its pictures and commentaries. In other words, what is omitted may have at least as much influence as what is included” (209).

Guidebooks could also be used as an indication of what should be missed. While omitted sights may be deemed worthless by the guidebook-instructed tourist, the anti- tourist, on the other hand, takes pride in knowing those unmentioned, unfrequented sights that never enter the mere tourist’s consciousness. Among those who preferred to think of

15 Dann carries this point further in order to point out the other notable, or rather, infamous effect of Baedeker’s star-system: “Indeed, so effective was the control exercised by Baedeker that Hermann Göring in 1942 was said to have instructed the Luftwaffe to destroy every historical landmark in Britain which was marked with an asterisk in Baedeker” (84). These Luftwaffe missions are commonly referred to as “Baedeker raids.” 36

themselves rather as travellers, that is, above mass tourism, the guidebook provided ample information about where the proverbial “herds of tourists” could be found, which cities would be crowded and during which months, and which hotels and pensiones would be full of the uneducated and uncouth masses. For these “anti-tourists,” as they are often called, the most authentic experiences were to be found “off the beaten track,” unmentioned in guidebooks, thus unspoiled by tourism. Tourists were less likely to venture into the unfamiliar and were explicitly warned against doing so by their guidebooks. For instance, those without a knowledge of Italian or French, Baedeker warns, “cannot deviate from the ordinary track, and are moreover invariably made to pay

‘alla Inglese’ by hotel-keepers and others, i.e. considerably more than the ordinary charges” (xiv). Thus, Baedeker’s guidebook, along with Murray’s and other popular guides, established itself by adopting a paternal, authoritarian voice.

For those tourists who relied exclusively on their Murray or Baedeker, it was only through visiting the starred sights that they could be assured of having seen the best that

Italy had to offer: the best example of Gothic architecture, the finest fresco by Giotto, the most picturesque view from a camponile. These were the sights which were unique to

Italy and represented that which was most essentially Italian. By codifying tourist destinations into a list of sites to seek, see, and check off, the guidebooks encourage a practice of commodification and cultural accumulation—transforming a site of historical and cultural significance into a sign of what the guidebooks and, thus, the tourists, deem valuable. Therefore, the quintessentially touristic practice of sight-seeing can more accurately be described as “sign-seeing.”

The tourists’ evaluation of sights as signs goes beyond an accumulation of sights strictly for their perceived cultural value as related by the star-system, speaking to the socio-economic preoccupations of the middle-class tourist. From guidebooks to package deals, travel industry professionals were selling tourism in a form that was as inexpensive and convenient as possible. The tourist, Boorstin argues, “expects everything to be done to him and for him. Thus foreign travel ceased to be an activity – an experience, an undertaking – and became instead a commodity” (85). The guidebooks’ primary function was to make Europe accessible and understandable, and one side-effect of that accessibility was the commodification, not just of travel, but of signs themselves.

According to Buzard, “Murray and Baedeker translated cultural meaning into the language of logic and commerce. Buying and using the guidebook was like imaginarily buying the things themselves” (222). The guidebooks act as a sort of catalogue, listing the paintings, cathedrals, and monuments that were available for “purchase.” Tourists could return home seeing themselves as well-traveled and cultured. Buzard further explains:

As long as European travel—or ‘travel’, in the value-laden sense—

commanded a price in the cultural markets of Britain and America, tourists

would remain strongly motivated to press claims of having witnessed

essential, symbolic, qualities of the places they visited. Packaging complex

societies in appropriate form, the sublime synthesis afforded culturally

marketable memories. One could demonstrate one’s having seen the

proper places in the proper way by showing that when faced with some

aggregate of impressions,16 one had rapturously inferred the whole. (212)

1616 Buzard’s argument, like my own, is not far removed Coleridge’s definition of the picturesque. 38

By providing lists, valued star-systems, and itineraries, guidebooks promote a myth of experiential totality. The guidebook provides all of the necessary information; one need only check-off the sights to have thoroughly “done” Europe.

Guidebooks are essential to the process of creating and perpetuating signs because without their itineraries, star-systems, and descriptions, tourists would not know what

“essential” qualities of Italy are or how to appreciate them. As Urry puts it, “People have to learn how, when and where to ‘gaze’” (10). Notwithstanding the simplicity of Urry’s phrasing, the questions raised by the picturesque are complex. How, for example, are tourists instructed to gaze? In what ways are tourists directed towards specific sites? How do guidebooks become the arbiters of high and low culture? Stephen Rachman explains that, “The cultural work of the literary medium is often to perpetuate its own style of mediation as essential to the fabric of understanding” (664). Tourists were dependent upon their guidebooks for information, without which sight/sign-seeing would not be possible, and thus the guidebook was just as important to understanding the sight as the sight itself. Urry explains how the tourist gaze shifts away from the site/sign to focus on the physical sign (i.e. plaque) that identifies the site:

[T]here is the seeing of particular signs [in the physical, non-semiotic

sense] that indicate that a certain other object is indeed extraordinary, even

though it does not seem to be so. A good example of such an object is

moon rock which appears unremarkable. The attraction is not the object

itself but the sign referring to it that marks it out as distinctive. Thus the

marker becomes the distinctive sight. (13)

Following Urry, we may assume that the guidebook explains the significance of the site/sight/sign, therefore transforming the act of reading into the primary mode of travel.17

However, because the sign’s meaning is mediated via the guidebook, the book itself becomes the primary sight.

John Ruskin’s Mornings in Florence: a Guidebook for the Cultured Tourist

When Murray’s first edition of The Handbook for Travellers to Northern Italy was published in 1842, John Ruskin led the charge against the guidebook’s inaccuracies, and, as a consequence, contributed several revisions for the second edition, published in

1847.18 Still, Ruskin continued to deride the guidebook in his personal and professional writings. A diary entry dated August 31, 1874 reads, “Lay long awake dividing days, and planning attack on Mr. Murray’s guides” (Diaries 808). This attack is divided into six chapters, with each chapter representing a single morning’s tour of Florence. In both structure and content, Mornings in Florence (1877) is a protest against and alternative to

Murray’s Italian handbooks, but Ruskin is too closely engaged with the discourse of guidebooks to avoid using the same forms and methods he protests.

Ruskin was already a recognized authority on Italy even before Mornings in

Florence. His earlier works, Modern Painters (1843 – 1860) and The Stones of Venice

(1851 – 1853) had made Ruskin one of the most revered names in aesthetics and art criticism, and scholars usually read his works for their contributions to these fields. Very little of that attention has been given to Ruskin’s life-long engagement with tourism and

17 For more on the act of reading as a mode of imaginative travel, see Byerly, Alison. Are We There Yet?: Virtual Travel and Victorian Realism. 18 Ruskin’s early involvement with Murray’s guides has been widely referenced. For a more detailed discussion, see Jan Palmowski’s “Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian England.” Histories of Leisure. Ed. Rudy Koshar. Oxford: Berg, 2002. (114). 40

its textual mediation, despite the fact that many of his most acclaimed works, including

Mornings in Florence, are fundamentally and explicitly travel books. Keith Hanley and

John K. Walton’s recent book Constructing Cultural Tourism: John Ruskin and the

Tourist Gaze (2010) is thus far the most comprehensive examination of Ruskin’s influence on the tourist industry. Hanley and Walton argue that reevaluating Ruskin’s role in the Victorian tourist industry has “the potential to change the face and agenda of the discipline” (1). Certainly, tourism studies have largely neglected Ruskin’s contributions, perhaps because his prominence as an aestheticist, social philosopher, and art historian has overshadowed much of the context of his life’s work.

Ruskin’s works, particularly Mornings in Florence, blur the lines of easy classification between vade mecum and belles lettres. Seaton explains the categories in this way:

The vade mecum text directs attention through the senses to objects in the

external world for the tourist gaze, by objectively inventorying places,

sites, routes and their features in the way that guides such as Baedeker,

Murray and Fodor have done. Belles lettres texts, in contrast are a more

diverse category, which encompasses travel memoirs and diaries, poetry,

novels and how-to-do-it texts…that implicitly or explicitly, offer

discursive modes of apprehension of, and response to, travel and place. If

the vade mecum text inventories the external world, the belles lettres text

inculcates mind sets for apprehending it. (148)

Ruskin allows for very little subjectivity, particularly on the part of the tourist; instead, he presents his views as objective truths. He addresses his reader directly and gives specific

instructions for apprehending art, history, and tourist experiences. At the same time, his narrative voice is personal, describing his own experiences and perspectives, but

Ruskin’s goal is not to write a travel memoir. His texts catalogue and categorize as much as any other guidebook because he specifically wants to provide a better guidebook than

Murray had produced.

Hanley and Walton observe, “Because of his critical agenda, it is impossible to separate Ruskin’s cultural guides and guidebooks from the body of his aesthetic, social and economic criticisms” (14). While this is certainly true, Mornings in Florence is

Ruskin’s most explicit critique of tourism, and it is the book most often cited by later travel writers. Besides Mornings in Florence (1875), Ruskin also wrote two other texts that were explicitly guidebooks, including his Guide to the Principle Pictures in the

Academy of Arts at Venice (1877) and St. Mark’s Rest: The History of Venice, written for the help of the few travellers who still care for her monuments (1877 - 84). Like

Mornings in Florence, St. Mark’s Rest provides step by step instructions for tourists, along with frequent criticisms of Murray. The book begins with Ruskin instructing, “Go first into the Piazetta, and stand anywhere in the shade, where you can well see its two granite pillars…Your Murray tells you that they are ‘famous’…It does not, however, tell you why or for what the pillars are ‘famous’” (1). In other words, Murray provides an idea of cultural value—famous sights should be admired by tourists—but Murray does not give the information required for a deeper and more complete understanding of the sight. There are a few other mentions of Murray’s inadequacies, as well as a passing reference to Eustace, but on the whole St. Mark’s Rest is only what it claims to be, slim volumes on the history of Venice. Ruskin also published condensed traveller’s editions of

Stones of Venice (1879 - 81) and the Bible of Amiens (1881), but these books are not about tourism, thus there are no references at all to Murray. The latter two titles include mostly history and art criticism, while the former titles, particularly Mornings in Florence and St. Mark’s Rest, include instruction, not just information; that is, Ruskin tells the tourist where to go, how to gaze, and what to think, all the while using these guides to launch his personal attack on Murray for promoting the same or similar practices.

This touristic tendency to read the guidebook without seeing the site itself is at the heart of Ruskin’s criticism of Murray’s Handbooks. In Mornings in Florence, Ruskin writes:

Without looking about you at all, you may find, in your Murray, the useful

information that [Santa Croce] is a church which ‘consists of a very wide

nave and lateral aisles, aided by seven fine pointed arches.’ And as you

will be—under the ordinary conditions of tourist hurry—glad to learn so

much without looking, it is little likely to occur to you that this nave and

two rich aisles required also, for your present comfort, walls at both ends,

and a roof on the top. (10)

Murray’s description of Santa Croce gives information that would be obvious to any tourist who simply looked away from the book, but Murray’s tourists, at least in Ruskin’s estimation, does not care to look. Ruskin’s criticism is directed both at Murray’s text, which encourages superficial tourism, as well as the tourists themselves, who blindly follow the guidebook. Ruskin’s attempts to discredit Murray are problematic because, like Murray’s Handbook, Mornings in Florence is still a guide, that is, yet another source of textual mediation. Tourists reading Ruskin’s book should not, as Buzard puts it, “lose

sight of the site for the sake of the book, as tourists in satirical scenes typically do” (289).

But if the book is read, as Ruskin intends, “in the places which [it] describe[s], or before the pictures to which [it] refer[s]” (v), he cannot escape the fate of textual mediation, which is to become a lens through which the site is viewed—if it is viewed at all.

Furthermore, as a vade mecum, Mornings in Florence relies on many other conventions of the guidebook, including setting an authoritarian tone, providing itineraries, commodifying tourism, and providing an aesthetic approach to sight-seeing.

Unlike the detached objectivity of Murray and Baedeker, Ruskin was respected for his expertise as a critic and taste maker, and his insistence that it is his duty to share his knowledge make his texts seem more trustworthy:

It seems to me that the real duty involved in my Oxford professorship

cannot be completely done by giving lectures in Oxford only, but that I

ought also to give what guidance I may to travellers in Italy. The

following letters are written as I would write to any of my friends who

asked me what they ought preferably to study in limited time.19

(“Preface,” Florence 2)

Ruskin creates a persona for himself: not only the Oxford don, but also the trusted friend.

He does not feign the objectivity of the guidebooks: he simply presents his text as truth, regardless of his clear bias. Whereas Murray’s famously instructs tourists on “what ought to be seen,” Ruskin offers what his readers “ought preferably to study in limited time.”

Significantly, Ruskin uses the term “study” rather than “see,” implying an intellectual engagement with the sites, rather than the visual, picturesque tourism promoted by

19 Elsa Damien points out: “Similarly, in the shorter Stones of Venice he aims at being: ‘as useful as possible to the traveller, by indicating only the objects which are really worth study’”(25). Damien concludes that Ruskin’s words “irresistibly remind us of the tourist guides’ rhetoric” (25). 44

guidebooks. He acknowledges, however, that his own tourists possess only “limited time,” and one can only assume that they, like Murray’s followers, would also be subject to “tourist hurry.”

In “The Fourth Morning,” Ruskin satirizes the rigidity of Murray’s itineraries, parodying the calculations of each half-hour allocated to a particular church, museum, or activity, leaving so many minutes to looking at a fresco or the roof and “three [minutes] for studying Murray’s explanations or mine” (Florence 113). While Ruskin does not divide his days into half-hour increments, Mornings in Florence does include, by its very structure, an itinerary of sites to visit on each of the six mornings. Without the necessity of speeding off to the next destination, however, Ruskin is only concerned with allotting enough time for studying and contemplating the Florentine works of art. The speed of modern travel does not demand a proportional speed for tourism: “Though indeed I came here from Lucca in three hours instead of a day, which it used to take, I do not think myself able, on that account, to see any picture in Florence in less time than it took formerly, or even obliged to hurry myself in any investigations connected with it” (113).

He may accept that his tourists will be rushed, but his tone remains both sarcastic and didactic as he attempts to teach tourists the error of their ways, or more likely, give his tourist-reader a well-deserved sense of superiority over Murray’s readers.

In contrast, Murray’s tone remained authoritative, but detached and objective.

Murray has nothing to gain from making strong value judgments that could lose him readers. Elsa Damien explains how Murray’s guidebooks maintain an objective tone while drawing information and authority from a wide variety of sources:

Art was becoming the raison d’être of a trip to Italy, so the guide must

necessarily be sufficiently instructive in that field, but the responsibility

for appreciation is partially left to the visitor. Some objects are described

precisely but without comments; the abundant use of quotations allows the

main editor to remain above all parties. (22)

Throughout the nineteenth century, and even into the early twentieth, Ruskin’s art criticism played a significant role in maintaining Italy’s central position in the Grand

Tour, in part because Ruskin would not leave “the responsibility for appreciation” to the tourist; nor was he interested in remaining objective in his views of Murray. Ruskin, for example, writes of Santa Croce, “Your Murray's Guide tells you the frescos in this chapel were painted between 1296 and 1304. But as they represent, among other personages, St.

Louis of Toulouse, who was not canonized till 1317, that statement is not altogether tenable” (12). Elsewhere, he criticizes Murray for incorrectly identifying a male musician in a fresco as Salome, the daughter of Herodias (81).When Ruskin sets to “planning [his] attack” on Murray, he does not pull any punches, delighting in pointing out the

Handbook’s inaccuracies.

The more serious fault, however, is the lack of taste shown by Murray’s favorable view of restoration.20 In Mornings in Florence, and throughout his life, Ruskin saw more beauty in decay, perhaps owing to his own picturesque aesthetic foundations, than to any new or—heaven forbid—restored work of art or architecture: “When, indeed, Murray’s

20 Jennifer Green-Lewis notes that when Ruskin was producing his mezzotint, “St. Mark’s, Southern Portico,” from an earlier daguerreotype, he “deliberately removed the gas lamps…[T]he removal of the modern gas lamps…tells us that in Ruskin’s interest in photography it is romantic rather than objective commemorative desire that is uppermost. The deliberate removal of the gas lamps conveys his sense of their being out-of-place, in some way wrong; the lamps are at odds with a ‘real view’ of St. Mark’s. The ‘real view’ for Ruskin contains the ‘glorious old weather stains’ bestowed by ‘centuries’—but not the more recent gift of the nineteenth century. For Ruskin, St. Mark’s is thus better served by the erasure of the present, because what is real—and where it is real—is the past” (“Already the past” 39). 46

Guide tells you that a building has been ‘magnificently restored,’ you may pass by in resigned despair; for that means that every bit of the old sculpture has been destroyed, and modern vulgar copies put up in its place” (80). In Ruskin’s view, Murray’s appreciation of cheap imitation and modern ornamentation shows the lack of taste often associated with mass-tourism. Murray does not teach the tourist how to appreciate art, but only lists the objects to look at. Murray and Baedeker systematically describe sites, giving dates, names, dimensions, opening times, and entry fees; but there are no instructions for how to interpret or understand the site aesthetically. As to artists and dates, Ruskin feigns ignorance: “I do not set myself up for a critic of authenticity,--but only of absolute goodness. My readers may trust me to tell them what is well done or ill; but by whom, is quite a separate question” (177). His disclaimer rings false because he is so quick to point out Murray’s errors. Still, Ruskin is less concerned with the minutiae than he is with instructing his readers on matters of taste.

By “The Third Morning,” Ruskin seems almost careless or bored: “I promised some note of Sandro's Fortitude, before whom I asked you to sit and read the end of my last letter; and I've lost my own notes about her, and forget, now, whether she has a sword, or a mace;--it does not matter” (51). On the one hand, this relaxed informality appeals to the reader, standing in contrast to the dry, fact-obsessed tone of Baedeker and

Murray. On the other hand, Ruskin’s text describes something that readers, if actually reading in Florence, could see for themselves; that is, he or she can see firsthand if the object is a sword or a mace. If Murray’s readers can learn so much without looking,

Ruskin’s readers, by looking up from the book, can gain knowledge that Ruskin leaves out, yet that detail “does not matter” so much as Ruskin’s estimation of whether the work

is “well done or ill.” Where Murray supplies prosaic facts and descriptions, Ruskin explains his viewpoints, which the reader should then adopt as his or her own: “Now whenever you feel inclined to speak of sculptured drapery, be assured, without more ado, the sculpture is base, and bad. You will merely waste your time and corrupt your taste by looking at it” (20). Ruskin suggests that taste—not money or class or education—is what sets the cultured traveller apart from the superficial tourist. To really see a sight, you must share Ruskin’s appreciation of its aesthetic qualities. He makes this point clear when he writes of a fresco by Giotto: “If you can be pleased with this, you can see

Florence. But if you are not…you can never see it” ( 29). Ruskin leaves no room for a difference of opinion between himself and his readers if they are to consider themselves more cultured than the stereotypical tourist.

For Ruskin, seeing involves something beyond mere optical exercise, some inherent, perhaps unnamable, gift of aesthetic vision, and Ruskin’s particular mode of seeing is at least partly a picturesque gaze. Throughout Mornings in Florence, Ruskin praises only those frescos, sculptures, and chapels that remain “unrestored,” while restoration equates with destruction. What Ruskin appreciates most is the authentic age and decay of art: “All the pleasure which the people of the nineteenth century take in art, as in pictures, sculpture, minor objects of virtu [sic], or medieval architecture, which we enjoy under the term picturesque…We find all men of true feeling delighting to escape out of modern cities into natural scenery” (Venice V.ii, 175). In Modern Painters, perhaps his most influential work, Ruskin picks up where Gilpin leaves off. Just as Gilpin adds “picturesque” as a third quality alongside Burke’s “sublime” and “beautiful,”

Ruskin constructs a taxonomy of the picturesque, which he claims is found “in the

unconscious suffering” (6). On his first order of the picturesque, he writes that, “Now, if this outward sublimity [i.e. classic signs of the picturesque] be sought for by the painter, without any regard for the real nature of the thing, and without any comprehension of the pathos of character hidden beneath, it forms the low school of the surface-picturesque”

(6). The lover of this type of picturesque is, “kind-hearted, innocent of evil, but not broad in thought; somewhat selfish, and incapable of acute sympathy with others” (11). For contrast he adds, “But if these same outward characters be sought for in subordination to the inner character of the object…while perfect sympathy is felt at the same time with the object as to all that it tells of itself in those sorrowful by-words, we have the school of true or noble picturesque” (7). Ruskin calls this the “Turnerian Picturesque,” which includes “a real vein of human sympathy” (11). This, in part, is why he is so critical of restored art, but even more so of art that has been manufactured to appear old.

In Mornings in Florence, there are only a few instances of Ruskin critiquing the picturesque, as when he deplores the “ordinary tricks of rapid sculptor trade…with offensively frank use of the drill hole to give picturesque rustication to the beard” (167).

Authenticity is certainly a major factor of Ruskin’s formula for the picturesque, but

“inner character” and “human sympathy” are vague qualities and impossible to quantify.

Malcolm Andrews argues that, “It would be hard to imagine a more radical challenge to the aesthetic premises of late eighteenth-century Picturesque than Ruskin’s emphatically ethical criteria” (237). While Ruskin’s reconfiguration of the picturesque demonstrates the evolution of the term over the roughly sixty years between Gilpin’s publication of

Three Essays (1782) and Ruskin’s Modern Painters (1843, 1846), his own writings seem to contradict claims that he was more ethical in his own role as a tourist. He seems to

have little, if any, sympathy with the poverty-stricken communities that benefit from tourism, believing the myth of pastoralism that living close to the land means happiness.

When he notes that, “[T]he influx of English wealth, gradually connecting all industry with the wants and ways of strangers, and inviting idleness to depend upon their casual help; thus gradually resolving the ancient consistency and pastoral simplicity of mountain life into the two irregular trades of innkeeper and mendicant” (384), he does not seem to recognize his own complicity, either as a participant or as an influential voice within the tourist industry which has reduced the “pastoral simplicity” to “idleness” and begging.

One difference here is the distance between Ruskin and the objects of his “acute sympathy with others.” The innkeeper and mendicant necessitate interaction. Asking for money is altogether different from inspiring sympathy from afar. With his visual foundation rooted firmly in the picturesque, Ruskin understands sympathy as an aesthetic response—an emotion, more than an action.

Aside from this reference to the deterioration of Alpine character, Ruskin does not instruct his readers on dealing with beggars, perhaps feeling as Baedeker does in the 1889 edition of Northern Italy that “[t]he average Italian beggar is a mere speculator, and not a deserving object of charity” (xv). There is some evidence of this in a letter written to his father on July 10, 1845:

Yesterday, I came on a poor little child lying flat on the pavement in

Bologna – sleeping like a corpse – possibly from too little food. I pulled

up immediately – not in pity, but in delight at the folds of its poor little

ragged chemise over his thin bosom – and gave the mother money – not in

charity, but to keep the flies off it while I made a sketch. I don’t see how

this is to be avoided, but it is very hardening.21 (Ruskin in Italy 142)

Ruskin is quick to point out that he is not given charity: he has paid the mother for a service. But it is difficult to determine what exactly “this” is that Ruskin wishes to avoid.

Is it the necessity of paying the mother to keep the flies away, or the starvation of the child? Given the picturesque gaze’s aestheticization of poverty, Ruskin’s wording remains ambiguous, despite his call for human sympathy.

From his personal and published writings, we can piece together a narrative of what Ruskin was like as a tourist, though he would have undoubtedly balked at the word.

We know that he aestheticized poverty and decay, and that he never bothered to learn much Italian. In fact, one could argue that Ruskin fell into the typical touristic practice of constructing an imaginary geography wherein Italy is part museum and part museum piece, a succession of landscape paintings and Giottos. Compared to England’s

“perpetual propriety and renovation, so that nothing is old, only ‘old-fashioned,’ and contemporary, as it were, in date and impressiveness only with last year’s bonnet”

(Modern Painters Vol. 4, 5), the ancient past of Italy and Switzerland is part of the present. When travelling abroad, Ruskin “feel[s] the ancient world to be a real thing, and one with the new: antiquity is no dream; it is rather the children playing about the old stones that are the dream” (Vol.4, 5). Children, indeed, all people, are ephemeral because they are mortal, while the buildings and ruins of the Continent are timeless, immortal:

21 Just above this passage, Ruskin complains that he has not been able to write well while abroad: “I am not at all surprised at the lines being so far inferior…The life I lead is far too comfortable & regular, too luxurious, too hardening…I don’t see how it is possible for a person who gets up at four, goes to bed at 10, eats ices when he is hot, beef when he is hungry, gets rid of all claims of charity by giving money which he hasn’t earned—and of those of compassion by treating all distress more as picturesque than as real—I don’t see how it is at all possible for such a person to write good poetry” (142). 51

“[A]ll is continuous; and the words, ‘from generation to generation,’ understandable here” (4.5). The past becomes something tangible that Ruskin can experience aesthetically and imaginatively.

Like so many tourists of his generation, Ruskin’s own imaginative geography is mapped out by Byron. Ruskin writes of first reading Don Juan (1819): “Byron was to be my master in verse, as Turner in color” (123), and later, “My Venice, like Turner’s, had been chiefly created for us by Byron” (238). Statements like these suggest that Ruskin saw direct relationships between art and literature, but it is also clear that his experiences as a tourist were more informed by romance than by the real, despite his claims that:

“Byron told me of, and reanimated for me, the real people whose feet had worn the marble I trod on” (129). Contradictions abound. In The Stones of Venice, Ruskin criticizes Byron’s inaccuracies and over-imaginative representation of the city. Where

Byron writes in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “I stood in Venice, on the Bridge of Sighs;

/A palace and a prison on each hand” (Canto IV. I. 1-2), Ruskin retorts, “No prisoner, whose name is worth remembering, or whose sorrows deserved sympathy, ever crossed that ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ which is the centre of the Byronic ideal of Venice” (Vol 2, 10).

Later, in the third volume of The Stones of Venice, Ruskin seems increasingly bitter:

’Sospiri, Ponte De’. The well known ‘Bridge of Sighs,’ a work of no

merit, and of a late period…owing the interest it possesses chiefly to its

pretty name, and to the ignorant sentimentalism of Byron; no great

merchant of Venice ever saw that Rialto under which the traveller now

passes with breathless interest. (373)

Ruskin finds Byron’s and Shakespeare’s descriptions inadequate for fully preparing visitors for experiencing Italy for themselves, in part because they are more romantic than accurate, but also because the medieval Venice of Ruskin’s own imagination predates the

Renaissance Bridge of Sighs and the Rialto by several centuries. Later, tourists like

Henry James, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, and E. M. Forster, find Ruskin as false as he finds Byron, complaining in the same breath both that Ruskin lacks imagination and that his romantic descriptions of Venice leave them ill prepared for their own journeys. There seems to always be an inescapable gap, created as a direct result of reading texts, between the tourist’s expectation and experience—a gap which significantly widens as tourists become travel-writers.

Chapter 2

“Everyone has wept and gurgled”:

Originality, Subjectivity, and the Intertextuality of Travel Writing

The frank conceit of the title of this book will, I hope, not prejudice my

friends against it…but will fasten the blame of all inaccuracies, if such

there be, upon the offender—myself. This [book]…presents people and

things, not as you saw them, perhaps, or as they really are, but only As

Seen By Me.

--Lilian Bell, “Author’s Apology” from As Seen by Me

The age of mass tourism was largely spearheaded by the publication of Murray’s

Handbooks for Travellers, itself a somewhat delayed product of the Enlightenment impetus to categorize and catalogue. Travel writers, on the other hand, were attempting something altogether different. Instead of listing notable sites and tables for currency conversion, travel writers of the long nineteenth century stressed the importance of personal experience. These texts present a counter narrative to the factual, erudite voices of Murray, Baedeker, Ruskin, and those strains of Gilpin’s picturesque still running through the tourist lexicon of the early twentieth century. To put it in terms of visual culture, travel guides record the world as it factually is—full of details, dates, and dimensions, much as a photograph captures the world at “it really is.” On the other end of the spectrum, travel writers, such as Henry James, Elizabeth Robins Pennell, Edith

Wharton, Vernon Lee, and others discussed here, resist the precision of photographic realism in favor of more subjective, even Impressionist, descriptions of their experiences, something akin to the Monet or Gauguin of travel literature.

For tourists who wanted strict guidelines of what to see and appreciate, Ruskin was an invaluable source, but his were certainly not the only aesthetic texts tourists turned to for knowledge about art. Published a few years before Mornings in Florence,

Water Pater’s Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) taught a generation how to see and appreciate art, and, perhaps more infamously, how to live, how to “burn always with this hard gemlike flame” (210). Much has been written and alleged about his influence over Oscar Wilde, but Pater’s roster of disciples also includes J.A. Symonds and Vernon Lee, who in turn influence other writers, such as Edith Wharton. Pater’s belief that “Beauty, like all other qualities presented to human experience, is relative”

(vii) is an axiom about the personal experience of beauty, but the same could be said about travel writing of the nineteenth century. Pater continues, “[I]n aesthetic criticism, the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s own impressions as it really is, to discriminate it, to realize it distinctively” (viii). This statement seems like a fitting description of the philosophy of travel writing. Rather than the exactitude and precision of guidebooks, travel writers stress the value of subjectivity, along with the personal truth of their own experiences. This chapter complicates the currents of scholarly criticism by showing these travelogues, not as failures of originality, but as responses to earlier, authoritarian, and largely masculine texts.

Travel writing is often characterized by its intertextuality, which influences many of the conventions of the genre. Just as guidebooks act as a lens through which Italy is viewed by the tourist, so too are the tourists’ own narratives mediated via prior texts; therefore, travel writing is highly referential and intertextual. Writers such as James, Lee, and Wharton publicly critiqued the guides of Murray, Baedeker, and, in particular,

Ruskin. These travel narratives enter into the discourse of tourism by directly addressing the form, function, and content of the vade mecum, while struggling to defend subjectivity as a valid form of originality. If the tourist’s perspective is altered by the mediation of vade mecums, what conclusions can be drawn about the tourist-writer whose visual attention is divided between his/her guidebooks and his/her own texts? These travel narratives also noticeably mirror the guidebooks’ search for the picturesque. While only a few of these writers mention Gilpin by name, most have an explicit discussion of the picturesque. The terminology travel writers employ—particularly notations of perspective, foreground, middle-distance, and far distance—denote not only the intrinsic relationship between travel and visual culture, but also the extensive influence of Gilpin, even into the twentieth century.

Unpacking the Theory of Travel Literature

As travel writers perform the conventional roles of tourists, they also reveal a nearly constant engagement with other texts. One of the most prevalent conventions in travel literature is the tendency of writers to turn their attention away from the sight and towards either the book they are reading or the one they are writing. The conclusion often drawn, both by writers and by critics, is that originality is impossible—there is nothing left to be said. Tourism, not just travel writing, is often viewed as a struggle to achieve originality, particularly via tropes such as “getting off the beaten track,” and travel writers often present themselves as explorers or adventurers, even though the areas

“explored” are often not as exotic or uncharted as they would have us believe. The urge to be a traveller or explorer, rather than a tourist, is a stereotypical response to mass

tourism. In “Travel as Performed Art,” Judith Adler claims that “Present-day tourism is best understood as a recent manifestation of an enduring art of travel whose performance entails movement through space in conventionally stylized ways” (1366). This is not a recent development, of course, and Adler provides a brief background for what she calls

“conventional travel histories:”

A body of travel performances may be comparable to a school of painting

or to an artistic movement. After the late 18th century, many travelers

overtly gave themselves and their journeys such labels as “romantic,”

“picturesque,” “philosophical,” “curious,” and “sentimental.” (1372)

These adopted labels are not only comparable to schools of painting, but are, in fact, inextricable, for to be a tourist in the nineteenth century was to be a picturesque tourist, while the “sentimental” traveller was modeled after Reverend Mr. Yorick in Laurence

Sterne’s novel A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). This novel, one of the earliest to focus on the practices and conventions of Grand Tourists, is a response to the grammars of travel, such as Eustace’s A Classical Tour, that emphasize Classical learning; instead, Sterne’s novel praises sentimentality, emotional response, and subjectivity as the goal of tourists. “Sentimental” soon became a watchword for travelogue titles, along with “rambles,” “leaves,” and “notebooks.” The roles of the sentimental tourist and the picturesque tourist are closely related in that they look for the same type of landscapes, and both types are often manifested in travelogues.

Comparable to Adler’s idea of performed tourist roles, A.V. Seaton explains tourism as:

a scripted ritual, through which the individual acts out a

performance…The performance, and the persona associated with it, may

be seen to be based on implicit rules governing: the sequencing and

structuring of the journey; the linguistic and aesthetic repertoires for its

successful discursive enactment; appropriate codes of self presentation;

and other features that may be conceptualized collectively as the

desiderata of successful tourism enactments. (146, emphasis original)

For Seaton, the script of this performance is located in the vade mecums and belles lettres of tourism, the latter of which “offer[s] discursive modes of apprehension of, and response to, travel and place…[and] inculcates mind sets for apprehending it” (148).

Tourists may identify so closely with a particular text or writer that they choose to follow the writer’s itinerary as closely as possible, even if places and sights described in the text are no longer extant. Seaton calls this type of tourism metempsychotic (136-137).

While many tourists and travel writers intentionally follow a specific guidebook, travelogue, fictional character, or historical figure, most of the personae performed by tourists are not so explicitly defined. In true guidebook fashion, Seaton catalogues the most common of these personae, including the “dilettante/ aesthete,” “the antiquarian heritage seeker,” and “explorer-adventurer,” and the “littérateur” (156), to name a few.22

Rather than following a specific text or journey, most tourists adopt multiple personae, whether intentionally or unintentionally. Because tourists and travel writers learn touristic

22 In total Seaton lists and describes twelve common personae: the dilettante/aesthete, the antiquarian heritage seeker, the explorer-adventurer, the sportsman, the festive charivariist, the sun and sand hedonist, the littérateur, the modernist, the familiarch/ paterfamilias, the epicurean, and the natural and social scientist. (156-159) 58

practices and conventions from a variety of texts, sources, and semiotic structures, they also adopt characteristics of multiple personae. Seaton claims that:

[T]he subject implicitly adopts several temporary personae, and repeats not

just, or any of, the elements of a specific journey, but enacts historically

and culturally situated personae attached to the role of the tourist. The

adoption of several personae by one actor may be called metensomatosis,

‘the migration into one body by many souls.23’ (150)

Later he describes metensomatosis as “a structuralist, social interaction model of tourist behavior, in which the tourist is seen as a temporary role-player who acts out personae, the scripts for which has come down to him/her within culture” (160), adding that “the majority of tourism is metensomatosis” (163). In other words, all tourists act out one or more of these roles.

Seaton sees the theory of metensomatosis as countering what he calls a “major bias in academic analyses” (161) towards phenomenology, sight-seeing, and the tourist gaze. Seaton posits a system in which all touristic practices are linked—an explicitly structuralist reading—but the implications of this reading prevent any possibility of originality or intentionality on the part of the tourist and/or travel writer. In doing so,

Seaton does for tourism what Barthes does for literary criticism: by erasing touristic intent, the tourist, at least the original, subjective tourist, is dead. There can be no original travel texts because, for Seaton, as for Barthes, there are no original utterances, only endlessly repeating networks of intertextuality.

The inherent intertextuality of travel writing causes frustrations for many authors, even those as prominent as Henry James, who desire to write original travelogues but feel

23 For this definition, Seaton’s cites Webster’s Third New International Dictionary (1971). 59

that possibility constantly blocked by earlier texts, but, just as frequently, express dissatisfaction that their own experiences do not live up to the anticipation inspired by reading. Eric Savoy describes both phenomena in his definition of travel as “the path from the place ‘read about’ to the place of ‘reading’ landscape through the lens of the prior text. This path, which is fraught with anxiety about preemption or depletion, is the site of writing, the site of the subverted gaze” (290, emphasis original). The “subverted gaze” of the travel writer adds yet another layer of textual mediation; it is the gaze redirected through, or rather, interrupted by, not only the texts being read but also the text being written. Drawing on the work of Michel Butor,24 Savoy argues that:

Especially in ‘late’ travel writing, that of the nineteenth century, the

primary feature of touristic convention is the referability of the later

writing to the earlier, the tendency both to see and to write through the

lenses of received texts, the consequent foreclosure of descriptive

opportunity, and the anxieties that attend such a foreclosure. (291)

For travel writers, sights have been emptied of any meaning that is “authentic,” that is unscripted and unmediated, and all writing is rendered redundant. Travel writers respond to this anxiety in a number of ways, often including disclaimers to excuse the text for lacking originality; at other times, they counter the authority of the prior texts and insist on subjectivity as a more authentic representation.

24 On Butor, Savoy writes: “The inescapable constraint of travel is potentially suggested by Michel Butor’s coining of the word ‘iterology’ to denote ‘a new science…strictly tied to literature concerned with human travel.’ Iterology is a neologism derived from the verb ‘to iterate,’ to repeat, and it resonates in an associative way with ‘itinerary.’ The literary productions of the Grand Tour, which crucially shaped the American travel essay of the late nineteenth century, are thus ‘(re)iterative,’ representational, doomed to reinscription” (289). 60

While Savoy is not the only scholar to take up this subject, he is one of the only ones to attempt a closer reading and greater understanding of the frustrations of travel writing, arguing: “[C]ritical inquiry into this complex genre needs to go further in examining travel writers’ anxious awareness of limits of, and obstacles to, representation” (287). After taking some steps towards a critical framework,25 Savoy adds: “What is required, then, is a more precise, more generically and historically specific theoretical paradigm to account for the prevailing tendency of late nineteenth-century travel writers to undermine the authority of both the gaze and its inscription” (288).

Savoy’s scope of inquiry is somewhat narrow, focusing only on three nineteenth-century

American writers: Henry James, William Dean Howells, and Nathanial Hawthorne; however, his work on the “subverted gaze” is as easily applicable to a wide range of travel writing, across genres, geographies, and time periods.

The subverted gaze is recognizable in travel writing throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, including women’s travel writing, which has been largely ignored, and in many cases completely forgotten. Women’s travel writing has gained considerably more attention over the past two decades, but as Adler explains, much of this “attention has thus far been limited to biographical emphasis on female travelers for readers’ admiration” (1380). Little has changed since Adler’s writing in 1989. While a more thorough theoretical analysis of women’s travel writing is still needed, it is not

25 Early in his essay, Savoy describes the gap between the text read and the text written, while the space in between—the space of experience—is a result of the autobiographical nature of travelogues. Savoy writes, “Quite simply, autobiographical composition arouses the writer’s fear that his or her language and the events that the language denotes are clearly distinct entities; as Paul de Man argues, ‘the ambivalence of writing is such that it can be considered both an act and an interpretive process that follows after an act with which it cannot coincide’” (288). 61

entirely surprising that female writers respond to masculine, authoritative texts with some dissent.

The travel writers discussed here are not only dissenting against prior texts, but they also express dissatisfaction with the gap between lived experience and the anticipation raised by prior reading. Furthermore, these travel writers often counter the myriad ways in which Murray and Ruskin imagine Italy as a museum space, while the response to the picturesque is a bit harder to pin down. Travel writers notoriously fall into a pattern of describing every sight, from the landscape to a villager’s dress as picturesque, and the picturesque gaze clearly informs the romantic, often sentimental language of travel writing. Still, there are also moments of complete rejection, when the aesthetic ideal cannot stand up against reality. In many cases, as soon as the imaginative, picturesque framework is established, it is quickly torn down when the faults of its fantasy are revealed.

Writing Tourism: Conventions of Travel Writing

Travel literature has existed perhaps as long as writing itself, but, historically, most of these texts have been about exploration, discovery, and adventure, such as The

Travels of Marco Polo26 and the diaries of Captain James Cook. With the rise of mass tourism in the nineteenth century and the increasing interest in Italy, the market grew for travel writing based on more familiar tourist destinations. According to John Pemble,

“The presses plied the reading public with Sketches, Notes, Diaries, Gleanings, Glimpses,

26 In Italian, Marco Polo’s writings are called Il Milione, a reference to the belief that the fantastic journals contain a million lies. In Venice, the courtyard adjoining the Polo’s home is still called La Corte del Milion. The house itself is now a hotel, Ca’Amadi, named for Count Francesco Amadi, another previous owner. In April, 2003, I spent a week at the Ca’Amadi, where the name “Marco Polo!” was shouted intermittently throughout the day by passing gondoliers. 62

Impressions, Pictures, Narratives, and Leaves from Journals about Tours, Visits,

Wanderings, Residences, Rambles, and Travels in all the quarters of the South” (6). From the belles lettres of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century tourists we have a body of literature comprised of first-person narratives that explicitly demonstrate the influence of texts and aesthetics on the tourist-writer. Some of these writers, including Charles

Dickens, Amelia Edwards, and, to some extent, Henry James, readily accept the knowledge and authority of Murray and Ruskin, while others, such as Elizabeth Robbins

Pennell, Vernon Lee, and, again, James, openly respond to, and usually against, these texts.

The Ruskinian Contagion: Henry James on John Ruskin

Unlike Mornings in Florence, Ruskin’s book The Stones of Venice (1851-53), which was written twenty-five years earlier, was not written as a travel guide, though small, pocket-sized excerpts were later published. The Stones of Venice is vastly different in tone from the pedagogical instruction of Mornings in Florence. For instance, the disdainful word “tourist” is never used in The Stones of Venice; instead, Ruskin refers to his reader as “traveller.” Nor is there any mention of Murray, whom Ruskin continually derides in Mornings in Florence and, later, in St. Mark’s Rest. He does, however, compare his own experience of Venice with descriptions from other texts, recognizing that the city he sees is not the same city he reads about. He cannot reconcile the romantic,

“Byronic ideal of Venice” (Venice 4) with the city he sees as “a ghost upon the sands of the sea, so weak—so quiet,—so bereft of all her loveliness, that we may well doubt, as we watched her faint reflection in the mirage of the lagoon, which was the City, and

which was the Shadow” (1). For Ruskin, Venice is too far decayed from her former glory to be recovered, and it is worth noting the visual metaphors that Ruskin employs—ghost, reflection, mirage, shadow. His imaginary Venice is more real, more solid, than the tangible city.

For many travel writers, Ruskin’s description of Venice expresses, as Kevin

Swafford puts it, “a cantankerous view of art and modernity that results in an irritable and authoritarian style of writing” (2). The response was a generation of travel writers who reject Ruskin as passionately as he condemns modern Venice. Ruskin’s love for Venice is rooted in an admiration for the city’s historic architecture and art, a legacy that he sees as literally and figuratively sinking into the sea. For Henry James and Elizabeth Robins

Pennell, the love of Venice is a passion for the city as it appears to them, not a nostalgic longing for a distant past. James was one of Ruskin’s most avid readers and admirers, yet also one of his most ardent opponents. From the early 1870s through the 1890s, James travelled through Italy, writing about Venice, Florence, and Rome, using The Stones of

Venice and Mornings in Florence as his guides. These essays were eventually compiled, expanded, and published as Italian Hours (1909). In “Venice,” the first essay in the collection, James praises Ruskin “who beyond anyone helps us to enjoy” (4) the city; however, he also reacts against what he calls “the Ruskinian contagion” (2), which tries to convince the reader that Venice has been spoiled by modernity. On The Stones of

Venice James writes, “It appears to be addressed to children of a tender age. It is pitched in a nursery-key, and might be supposed to emanate from an angry governess” (2). James rarely takes issue with matters of fact, acknowledging Ruskin’s extensive knowledge, but he often contradicts Ruskin’s subjective opinion when it is presented as fact.

Above all else, it is Ruskin’s tone of authority that James abhors: “The author has spent his life laying down the principles of form and scolding people for departing from them” (2). Likewise, in “Italy Revisited,” James describes the “pedagogic fashion in which [Ruskin] pushes and pulls his unhappy pupils about, jerking their heads towards this, rapping their knuckles for that, sending them to stand in corners and giving them

Scripture texts to copy” (181). Imagining one of the most prominent Victorian art critics as a mere cranky schoolteacher is perhaps amusing, but James is not exaggerating. In

Mornings in Florence, Ruskin actually does instruct his readers to “go home to-day, take the pains to write out for yourself … the verses underneath numbered from the book of

Judith; you will probably think of their meaning more carefully as you write” (53).

Unfortunately, there is no way to collect data on how many of Ruskin’s obedient students actually copied the verses, but you can safely assume James did not.

James’s sarcasm bleeds through with the ink whenever he feels at odds with

Ruskin’s instructions, as he does when reading Mornings in Florence:

I had really been enjoying the good old city of Florence, but I now learned

from Mr. Ruskin that this was a scandalous waste of charity. I should have

gone about with imprecation on my lips, I should have worn a face three

yards long…I had much admired Santa Croce and had thought the Duomo

a very noble affair; but had now the most positive assurance I knew

nothing about them. (179)

Ruskin’s displeasure with modern Venice is equally matched by his disapproval of both modern and Renaissance Florence, to such an extent that one wonders why he writes about the city at all. James adds, “If it was only ill-humour that was needed for doing

honour to the city of the Medici, I felt that I had risen to a proper level; only now it was

Mr. Ruskin himself I had lost patience with” (179). If we read the essays of Italian Hours chronologically, rather than in the order in which they are bound, there is no unfolding narrative of early James admiring the erudite Ruskin until a more mature James casts him aside. Instead, each essay goes back and forth, sometimes bordering on hero-worship, oftentimes finding Ruskin “comical” (4) and “humorous” (4), at other times calling him

“invidious and insane” (179).

James’s contention with Ruskin stems from the way in which Ruskin’s texts forbid any response that differs from his own. For James, “there are a great many ways of seeing Florence” (180), while Ruskin “depends upon our squaring our toes with a certain particular chalk mark” (181). James takes issue with the singularity of Ruskin’s instructions which prevent the tourist from following their own judgements of beauty:

“We see Florence wherever and whenever we enjoy it, and for enjoying it we find a great many more pretexts than Mr. Ruskin seems inclined to allow” (181). Enjoyment of a place, for James, should not be constrained or dictated by a text. It is something more personal and based upon one’s own impressions.

Once James loses patience with The Stones of Venice, he writes: “One hour of the lagoon is worth a hundred pages of demoralised prose” (4). Likewise, after reading

Mornings in Florence in Santa Maria Novella, James comments: “Occupying one’s self with light literature in a great religious edifice is perhaps as bad a piece of profanation as any of those rude dealings which Mr. Ruskin justly deplores” (178). There is some irony in James’s statement: first, in his calling Ruskin “light literature,” but also in the fact that what Ruskin deplores most are those tourists who visit Santa Croce with their Murray,

“without looking about [themselves] at all” (MF 13). Mornings in Florence was also intended to be read in front of the very monuments it describes; Ruskin writes in his preface: “I hope [the essays] may be found of use if read in the places which they describe, or before the pictures to which they refer” (3). While criticizing the textual mediation of the guidebook, Ruskin provides his own text to subvert the tourist gaze.

James’s criticism intentionally mimics Ruskin’s criticism of Murray. What we see here is a chain of textual mediation, whereby travel writers advocate subjective experience and deride a reliance on authoritative texts, all the while constructing their own texts to draw away the traveller’s attention.

In writing Italian Hours James also contributes to the textual mediation of tourism, but his are not guidebooks to be read, text in hand, at various points throughout

Italy, though he was likely read this way. Most of the essays first appeared in magazines, such as Scribner’s and The Atlantic Monthly, and, although his audience might range from the armchair traveller to tourists abroad, he is writing for an audience that had already travelled and returned home. In “Venice,” which first appeared in The Century

Magazine in November, 1882, James writes, “I do not pretend to enlighten the reader: I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory; and I hold any writer sufficiently justified who is himself in love with his theme” (IH 4). With this one sentence James satisfies two prevalent conventions of travelogues—first, to identify his/her audience and, second, to provide some sort of apologia for writing a travelogue on Italy. These precursory disclaimers are a direct response to the genre conventions of guidebooks, which serve a utilitarian purpose of presenting, as Murray’s Handbook asserts, “matter-of-fact descriptions of what ought to be seen” (v, emphasis original). The “Preface” to Italian

Hours evokes the language of Murray, italics included, when James claims to present only “the interesting face of things as it mainly used to be” (“Preface,” emphasis original). Italian Hours, which was published thirty years after its earliest essay, makes no claims of being useful to the tourist since any information included would likely be out of date. Interestingly, James does not defend his volume as an accurate representation of the past, but only as his own memories or impressions, and one cannot help but wonder how much nostalgia came into play.

At the same time, however, James must make excuses for why he is writing at all on a subject already so extensively textualized, and to do this, he must stress the subjectivity of both touristic experience and writing. He writes that Venice, “has been painted and described many thousands of times, and of all the cities in the world is the easiest to visit without going there. Open the first book and you will find a rhapsody about it…There is notoriously nothing more to be said on the subject” (3). This is what

Savoy calls the “exhaustion” (292) of travel writing as a genre, but Savoy then suggests that this may be a catalyst for James to achieve originality: “The acknowledgement of exhaustion constitutes, at least potentially, a point of departure or renewal, for it frequently prompts the American travel writer to inquire into the limitations of perception, or to subvert, correct or reinscribe the prior text” (292). As we know, James does not abandon writing about Venice simply because it is already pre-scripted: “It is not forbidden ... to speak of familiar things, and I hold that for the true Venice-lover

Venice is always in order. There is nothing new to be said about her certainly, but the old is better than any novelty” (Italian Hours 3). He does not seem invested in the struggle

for originality, yet what makes James so interesting is his reinscription of Venice and his pointed critique of Ruskin.

Despite being amused by his egotism, James cannot deny that Ruskin is the recognized authority on Venice. Ruskin’s pedantry and harsh criticism for any dissenting opinion makes James anxious about his own text: “We feel at such moments as if the eye of Mr. Ruskin were upon us; we grow nervous and lose our confidence. This makes me inevitably, in talking of Venice, seek a pusillanimous safety in the trivial and the obvious” (58). James cannot escape the panoptic power of Ruskin and seems to almost give up because there is “nothing…to discover or describe, and originality of attitude is completely impossible” (8). As a tourist, James may be able to find “a great many more pretexts” for enjoying Florence, Venice, or any other city in Italy, but as a tourist-writer, all creativity has been pre-empted.

“Damn the middle distance!”: James on Guidebooks and the Picturesque

On one point James and Ruskin agree: the inefficiency of Murray’s Handbooks.

By then, Murray had grown out of date, his advice and descriptions “much truer twenty years ago than to-day” (Italian Hours 257). By the late nineteenth century, Murray had been superseded by Baedeker, who drew equal, if not greater, criticism from travel writers, and while James also criticizes guidebooks, he admits to carrying them himself.

Yet James also urges moments when one must put away the books and stand still,

“without criticising or analysing or thinking a strenuous thought” (5). James humorously describes a party of tourists watching a sunset, with “their Baedekers only just showing in their pockets—the sunsets not being down among the tariffed articles in these precious

volumes. I went so far as to hope for them that, like myself, they were, under every precaution, taking some amorous intellectual liberty with the scene” (267). James’s tongue-in-cheek description of Baedeker points to the same flaws found in Ruskin—they simply cannot pre-script experience, and the moments when tourists enjoy themselves the most are the moments when texts are altogether abandoned.

Even these unscripted moments, however, are still about passively watching—a sunset, a landscape, a spectacle. Even though James, like many travel writers, disparages certain superficial tourist practices, such as checking off sights from guidebooks, he often enthusiastically embraces the picturesque, despite the aesthetic distance between the tourist and the authentically Italian. In “Roman Neighborhoods,” first published in 1873,

James describes a visit to the Alban Mount: “I had been talking of the ‘picturesque’ all my life, but now for a change I beheld it” (239). During his time in Rome, James sees the city in the foreground, looking across the campagna, with the mountain as “an agreeable incident in the variable background of Rome” (239). When he visits the village of

Albano, the view is reversed, with the village in the foreground and “suffering St. Peter’s to play the part of the small mountain on the horizon” (239). This configuration is interesting in that it demonstrates the late-nineteenth century’s increasing urbanization of the picturesque, and it also irrefutably shows Gilpin’s enduring influence over an idealized landscape, and, of course, over the ways in which James imagines Italian geography.

Five years later, in the same magazine, The Atlantic Monthly, James publishes

“Italy Revisited,” which begins with a stereotypical landscape:

I stood in the shadow of the tall old gateway admiring the scene…the

wonderful walls of the little town, perched on the edge of a shaggy

precipice; at the circling mountains over against them; at the road dipping

downward among the chestnuts and olives. There was no one within sight

but a young man who slowly trudged upward...I said to myself that in Italy

accident was always romantic and that such a figure had been exactly what

was wanted to set off the landscape. (165)

The landscape he views corresponds exactly with the principles of Gilpin, but as James draws near the young man and converses with him, the ideal of the happy, rustic, Italian peasant is destroyed. Instead the man was:

a brooding young radical and communist…unhappy, underfed,

unemployed young man, who took a hard, grim view of everything…This

made it very absurd of me to have looked at him simply as a graceful

ornament to the prospect, an harmonious little figure in the middle

distance. “Damn the prospect. Damn the middle distance!” would have

been all his philosophy. (166)

The reliance on Gilpin’s terminology shows that the picturesque was still very much upon the minds of tourist a hundred years after Three Essays was published, but this scene also demonstrates James’s gradual disillusionment with the picturesque gaze, an understanding that the reality does not match the romantic ideal. Once the safe distance between the tourist and the object is removed, the picturesque is deconstructed, and for

James this deconstruction is both aesthetically and politically destabilizing.

“Bullied by Ruskin”: Elizabeth Robbins Pennell in Venice

In her travel memoir, Nights: Rome, Venice, in the Aesthetic Eighties; London,

Paris in the Fighting Nineties (1916), Elizabeth Robins Pennell describes how she, too, had once been deeply influenced by Ruskin, but that after her own experiences abroad, she grew to utterly reject him. Pennell was an American journalist and wife of illustrator

Joseph Pennell, who is best known as the illustrator of Italian Hours. The Pennells were part of the intellectual and aesthetic movement in Italy during the fin de siècle, giving her a unique perspective on Ruskin’s reputation in Venice. Pennell writes that to her great surprise:

It was a very different past from that which tourists were then bullied by

Ruskin into believing should alone concern them in Venice…[P]eople

who were not artists but posed as knowing all about art did nothing but

quote Ruskin, artists never quoted him, and never mentioned him except

to show how little use they had for him. (92)

Whereas James continues his devotion, despite both frustration and amusement at

Ruskin’s pedantry, Pennell turns against him, perhaps partially owing to her allegiance to

Ruskin’s rival, James McNeill Whistler.27

When Pennell first arrives in Venice, she is disappointed because the reality of the city does not meet the expectations formed while reading The Stones of Venice: “My first impressions of Venice were gathered in the freezing, foggy station restaurant…and I

27 Whistler sued Ruskin for libel in 1877, following Ruskin’s harsh review of Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket: “I have seen and heard much of Cockney impudence before now, but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face” (qtd. in Pennell, E.R. and Pennell, J. The Whistler Journal. Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1921. 317.) Whistler won the suit, but was only awarded a farthing, which far from recouped his legal fees, contributing to Whistler’s financial ruin. The Pennells were close friends of Whistler, eventually writing the first biography of the artist. They also collected his letters, legal documents, and ephemera, which were donated to the Library of Congress in 1917, along with the Pennells’ personal papers. 72

would have thought Ruskin a fraud with his purple passage describing the traveller’s arrival in Venice upon which I had based my expectations, had I been wide enough awake to think of anything at all” (73). The “purple passage” to which Pennell refers is one of Ruskin’s most poetic descriptions in The Stones of Venice, in which he describes arriving in the city “in the olden days of travelling, now to return no more” (1), that is, before the advent of the railways. Ruskin writes of:

the strange rising of [Venice’s] walls and towers out of the midst, as it

seemed, of the deep blue sea…The salt breeze, the white moaning birds,

the masses of black weed…As the boat drew nearer to the city…the hills

of Arqua rose in a dark cluster of purple pyramids, balanced on the mirage

of the lagoon. (2)

Compared to Ruskin’s typical disparagement and scolding, this passage inspires an imaginative, perhaps subtly picturesque, geography. Even though Pennell travels to

Venice by train, which Ruskin sees as the destruction of the earlier, romantic first- glimpses, her anticipation is still founded on his nostalgic texts. For Pennell, The Stones of Venice had created an image of Venice, and that image, once anticipated, became a sign of the city. When the reality does not match that sign, Pennell sees him as a “fraud”

(73), abandoning his view of Venice in favour of her own.

James also describes arriving in Venice by train, but rather than countering The

Stones of Venice, James translates his own impressions into Ruskinian language:

[The] distinct sea-smell which has added speed to the precursive flight of

your imagination…then your long rumble on the immense white railway-

bridge, which, in spite of the invidious contrast drawn, and very properly,

by Mr. Ruskin between the old and the new approach, does truly, in a

manner, shine across the green lap of the lagoon like a mighty causeway

of marble. (73)

Whereas Pennell rejects Ruskin’s sign when contrasted with her experience, James tries to manipulate its application to his own arrival in Venice, describing colors and smells and adopting Ruskin’s romanticized and nostalgic tone. Despite their different interpretations, both James and Pennell immediately compare their respective experiences with The Stones of Venice. Ruskin’s text, because of its iconic status, becomes the standard with which to compare any arrival in Venice. The very act of reading Ruskin, whether questioning his authority or not, mediates the response to the city.28

Once Pennell has spent time in Venice, she is re-educated: “All I had thought right turned out to be wrong, all I had never thought of was right, all that was essential to the critic of art, to the Ruskin-bred, had nothing to do with it whatever” (46). The normal subjects of art critics, including “history, dates, periods, schools, sentiment, meaning, attributions” (46) are all meaningless to practicing artists, who are concerned only with the skills of their trade: “treatment, colour, values, tone, mediums [sic]” (46). What

Pennell and her artist friends resent most is the tourist who, having read a guidebook, feels they have a specialized knowledge of art: “I trembled to think of the shock to tourists and my highly intellectual friends at home, religiously studying Baedeker and

28 My first arrival in Venice is somewhere between Pennell’s and James’s, arriving on a cool, foggy morning into the bustling Stazione di Venezia Santa Lucia. Tired and hungry, I bought a croissant and hot chocolate before making my way to the vaporetto. Still, I was exuberant watching the city appear in the distance, seeing the lagoon inching closer to the tracks. I was an undergraduate and had not yet read The Stones of Venice, still his description—as well as Pennell’s and James’s—lie like a colored, hazy film over my own memories, proving the extent to which literature can retroactively mediate past experiences. Now, I would not be able to step foot in Italy without hearing Ruskin’s voice. 74

reading Ruskin, could they have heard the men from Munich29 talking of art and of

Venice” (102). From the artists in Venice, particularly her friendship with Whistler, she learns “a glimmering of the truth Whistler was trying to beat into the unwilling head of the British public—that an artist knows more about art than a man who isn’t an artist, and has the best right to an opinion of the subject” (102). To artists then working in Italy,

Ruskin failed to meet that requirement; he was only a critic, and, worse, one who openly disdained modern Italy along with the art they were producing there.

Nights was written in 1916, a few decades after the travels Pennell describes; therefore, her feelings about Ruskin may be much more decisive in retrospect than they perhaps were at the time. In her first travelogue, Our Sentimental Journey through

France and Italy (1888), Pennell prefaces her book with a “Note to the Critic and the

Reader,” the “critic” in this case being Ruskin: “In our simplicity we thought by publishing our journey we could show the world at large, and perhaps Mr. Ruskin in particular, that the oft-regretted delights of travelling in days of coach and post-chaise, destroyed on the coming of the railroad, were once more to be had by means of tricycle or bicycle” (vi). Our Sentimental Journey is one of several accounts Pennell wrote about her long bicycle journeys with her husband, whom she usually refers to simply as “J.”

Pennell was a great cycling enthusiast, praising the relatively new conveyance for its ease of operation, aid to exercise, and increased mobility. She was, therefore, incensed by

Ruskin’s, as he phrased it, “reprobation of the bi-,tri-, and 4-5-6 or 7 cycles, and every

29 The “men from Munich,” whom Pennell also calls “the boys,” were not actually from Munich at all, but were mostly American artists, led by Frank Duveneck. The “Duveneck boys” were a group of pupils that followed him from America to Munich, then to Italy. “The boys” included John Henry Twachtman, Julius Rolshoven, and others whom Pennell writes “have passed into the history of American Art and the history of Venice” (85).

other contrivance and invention for superseding human feet on God’s ground” (Ruskin,

The Works of John Ruskin 617). Despite this difference of opinion, Pennell does invoke a sense of nostalgia for the era of travel that Ruskin praises, though she was born decades after the railroad. She also, it should be noted, travels through France and Italy with

Ruskin in hand, falling back on his descriptions, vocabulary, and opinions to fill the gaps in her own.

Though Ruskin certainly influences Our Sentimental Journey through France and

Italy, it is more of a tribute to Lawrence Sterne than an approbation of Ruskin. The book is dedicated to Sterne, whom she addresses directly: “It is because of the conscientious fidelity with which we rode over the route made ever famous by you, that we have included ourselves in the class of Sentimental Travellers, of which you must ever be the incomparable head” (x). The Pennells try not miss a single city or site described by

Sterne in Our Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768). According to

Seaton’s definition, Pennell’s travelogue qualifies as metempsychotic in that: “[T]he subject knowingly repeats a single journey made by one named significant other or others” (136). Thus, Our Sentimental Journey disproves Seaton’s claims that there are

“no memtempsychotic texts by or about women” (135). Sterne is Pennell’s primary guide for what to see and feel along the journey, and it is this acceptance of Sterne’s sentimentality over Ruskin’s knowledge and authority that establishes a clear precedent for her later memoirs.

She ends her “Note to the Critic and the Reader” not with an apology, as many travelogues do, but with a promise: “As of future rides and records, if we make any, it is our intention to for ever [sic] keep them to ourselves, and so—spare the public” (vii).

Pennell’s self-deprecating humor is as close to the conventional apologetics or disclaimers as Pennell gives, and, furthermore, the public was not “spared.” Pennell followed Our Sentimental Journey with Our Journey to the Hebrides (1889), Around

London on a Bicycle (1897), Over the Alps on a Bicycle (1898), and others from a long and prolific life that has been all but forgotten by scholars.

As tourists, both James and Pennell find their experience mediated through

Ruskin’s texts; therefore, as writers, their descriptions of Italy—that is, the texts they create—also bear the marks of Ruskin’s mediation. Furthermore, it should not be forgotten that travel writing is the production of additional texts of mediation. The lamentation by writers that other texts have not correctly expressed or described a place—as when James and Pennell criticize Ruskin’s portrayal of Venice—is linked to their own writing. Not only do writers find that the prior texts have failed to prepare them for the place, but they too have the anxiety that they will be unable to accurately render a place in their own texts.

Dickens’s Pictures from Pre-Ruskin Italy

There are, of course, many instances in which travel writers never question the accuracy of their guidebooks. Charles Dickens, writing in those early years of tourism before Ruskin set out to discredit Murray’s Handbooks, gives readers of Pictures from

Italy (1846) the disclaimer: “If you would know all about the architecture of this church, or any other, its dates, dimensions, endowments, and history, is it not written in Mr

Murray’s Guide-Book, and may you not read it there, with thanks to him, as I did!” (18).

Unlike Ruskin, Dickens has no interest in writing a guidebook, or in re-writing the

guidebook form, for that matter; he simply wants to write a book about his own experiences abroad, not by attempting to disprove Murray at every turn, but in leaving the details to that trusted authority.

Pictures from Italy begins as many travelogues do, with a disclaimer—not an

“excuse,” Dickens is quick to say—for his inaccuracies, reasons for writing, and how he approaches the subject:

This Book is a series of faint reflections—mere shadows in the water—of

places to which the imaginations of most people are attracted to a greater

or less degree… The greater part of the descriptions were written on the

spot, and sent home, from time to time, in private letters. I do not mention

the circumstances as an excuse for any defects they may present, for it

would be none; but as a guarantee to the Reader that they were at least

penned in the fulness [sic] of the subject, and with the liveliest of novelty

and freshness. (2)

Dickens wants to assure his readers that this is not a work of fiction, nor was it written after time had dulled his memories. If the tourist who reads in front of the site has a

“subverted gaze,” then how are we to figure the tourist who writes in front of the site?

Dickens implies that by writing “on the spot,” he gives a more accurate representation of

Italy, as he is writing, much like the Pre-Raphelites paint, en pleine aire and from life.30

Rather than distracting the tourist, the immediacy and proximity of writing implies an almost photographic veracity. At the same time, Dickens insists that these are, as the title says, Pictures from Italy: “I have likened these Pictures to shadows in the water, and

30 Painting en pleine aire and from life were tenets of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which formed only two years after Dickens’s writing, but the idea of on-the-spot authenticity and realism were already in circulation following the advent of photography. 78

would fain hope that I have, nowhere, stirred the water so roughly, as to mar the shadows” (4). Dickens is writing five years before the first volume of The Stones of

Venice, but his wording is remarkably similar to Ruskin’s description of Venice as a

“ghost” upon the water, unable to tell “which was the City, and which was the shadow”

(SV 1). One can also not help but notice the Turnersque quality of Dickens’s disclaimer—

J.M.W. Turner was then painting magnificent scenes of Venice—suggesting that accuracy or veracity in representation does not necessarily lie in exact reproduction, but in “mere shadows” visible only at certain times and places.

Throughout Pictures from Italy, Dickens consciously uses the language of painting, drawing on the picturesque, but warning against aesthetic complicity:

[L]overs and hunters of the picturesque, let us not keep too studiously out

of view the miserable depravity, degradation, and wretchedness, with

which the gay Neapolitan life is inseparably associated. It is not well to

find St. Giles’s so repulsive, and the Porta Cauana so attractive. (222)

There are numerous instances in which Dickens admires the scenery without mentioning the poverty which produces the picturesque, but in this instance, he not only admonishes the traveller, but also suggests a new way of seeing: “[L]et us, as our duty, try to associate a new picturesque with some faint recognition of man’s destiny and capabilities, more hopeful, I believe, among the ice and snow of the North Pole, than in the sun and bloom of Naples” (222). Dickens does not go further in offering examples of this new picturesque or how it might be achieved, but it does not seem possible in a land so perpetually wracked by poverty, crime, and political corruption.

Amelia Edwards in Italy and Egypt

Nearly a quarter of a century after Dickens wrote Pictures from Italy, tourists and writers alike were pursuing a wider itinerary, taking in Egypt and Palestine, yet travel writers continued to defer to Murray or Baedeker for the minutiae. In A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), Amelia Edwards refuses to describe temples or mountains because all descriptions sound the same: “In the present instance, therefore, I will note only a few points of special interest, referring those who wish for fuller particulars to the elaborate account of Medinet Haboo [the burial site of Ramses III] in Murray’s Handbook of

Egypt” (619). At the same time, Edwards frequently draws attention to Murray’s shortcomings, either by pointing out specific errors in the guidebook—“Murray is wrong, however, in attributing the building to Ramses II. The cartouches are those of Ramses

III” (43)—or by criticizing the inadequacies of texts to capture experience, writing of the tourist in the Aboo Simbel temples, “Holding to the merest thread of explanation, he wanders from hall to hall, lacking altogether that potent charm of foregone association which no Murray can furnish” (386). Still, Edwards, knowing these faults, and perhaps simply because a faulty text is better than no text at all, continues to rely on Murray for matters of detail, adopting his anglicized spellings for Arabic words and, at times, footnoting long quotes from the guidebook.

In Edwards’s Italian memoirs, Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys: A

Midsummer Ramble in The Dolomites (1890), she is far less dependent upon Murray, perhaps because there were already so many texts written about the region, and Edwards is keen to always appear as an adventuress unencumbered by tourist conventions. She mentions the guidebook only once in her Ramble, to reference a missed sight: “Treviso

comes next—apparently a considerable place. Here, according to Murray, is a fine

Annunciation of Titian to be seen in the Duomo, but we, alas! have no time to stay for it”

(31). Despite all attempts to present herself as a traveller-explorer to exotic and unfrequented locals, Edwards still travels with her Murrays, whether in Egypt or Italy, and is still plagued by the incessant “tourist hurry.”

Perhaps what is most striking about Amelia Edwards is how anachronistic she sometimes seems. Both her route and title for Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented

Valleys is supposed to show Edwards as an explorer off the beaten track, but her language gestures towards those many regions of Italy that are already well-trodden and frequented by mass tourism, a trace of presence in absence. At the same time, her subtitle, A

Midsummer Ramble in the Dolomites, is reminiscent of those “rambles” and

“wanderings” so popular among female travel writers of the pre-tourist era of the 1820s and 30s. Even when Edwards passes through popular destinations, she is quick to point out the absence of tourists: “[I]t was less like a dream than a changed reality. It was

Venice; but not quite the old Venice [of her earlier visit]. It was a gayer, fuller, noisier

Venice; a Venice empty of English and American tourists; full to overflowing of Italians in every variety of summer finery” (27). Edwards clearly does not count herself among those tourists, posing more as an adventurer-traveller.

Not only is Venice free of tourists, but there is also a conspicuous absence of tourists’ texts. Even in her lyrical descriptions of Venice, there is scarcely any mention of

Ruskin. In the first edition of Untrodden Peaks (1873), Edwards laments, “Why had I not

Mr. Ruskin’s power to create landscapes with words?” (“Preface”). In the 1890 edition, this line is completely excised, and Ruskin has been reduced to an unnamed “Mr. R.”

who advises female travellers to pack their own side-saddles to use upon Monte

Generoso (28). Edwards stands out among her contemporary travel writers because of her lack of engagement with other texts, most likely because Edwards goes to such great lengths to set herself apart from the average tourist. Her only significant reference to texts is in a footnote, included in both the 1873 and 1890 editions, stating that she is “indebted to Mr. G. C. Churchill’s admirable ‘Physical Descriptions of the Dolomite District’ for the particulars epitomized above” (“Preface,” 1873). There were critics, however, who claimed that Churchill deserves more than a footnote, and that what Edwards does not say about other texts is more revealing than what she is does say. Explaining the controversy around Edwards’s possible sources, Patricia O’Neill writes:

When the book was reprinted in the 1880s, the Athenaeum reported it as a

new edition of Gilbert’s and Churchill’s travels to the Dolomites with

illustrations by Amelia Edwards. Edwards wrote to the journal to request a

retraction and correction. She was answered with a published note in

which the error is explained as excusable, since Edwards ‘is more indebted

to their labours than she is probably herself aware.’ (169)

The editor does not go so far as to call Edwards a plagiarist, but instead adopts a clearly patronizing tone, stripping her of agency by insisting that she was not even aware of her errors, perhaps because women writers were seen as sentimental and novelistic, and should not lay claim to accuracy or exploration. O’Neill sees this as evidence of the editor’s “skepticism about a woman’s accuracy” (169), defending Edwards as a pioneering travel writer, unfairly maligned simply because she is female.

In fact, O’Neill entitles her own chapter “From Novelist to Egyptologist,” chronicling Edwards progression from the romantic plot of “the conventional Victorian lady novelist” (166) to the serious work of studying ancient Egypt:

Her second travelogue, A Thousand Miles up the Nile, published in 1877,

marked a transition not only in her life but in the history of women’s travel

writing. While earlier travelogues had tended to be personal narratives,

Edwards uses the genre in order to assert her own authority in the field of

scientific exploration. (165)

I approach Edwards from a different perspective, seeing her exploration, scientific or otherwise, as an attempt to replicate other authoritative texts. She performs the role of adventurer and explorer, but she travels to places that already have guidebooks to direct her through the terrain. These passages which O’Neill sees as transformative for Edwards and the history of female travel writers are actually less interesting than those moments in which Edwards becomes more subjective and sentimental in describing her own impressions and experiences, rather than replicating guidebooks.

There is little indication that Edwards intends for Untrodden Peaks and

Unfrequented Valleys to be a scientific or guidebook-like survey of the mountains; instead, her preface claims: “although I have endeavoured to give a strictly faithful account of this Dolomite country, I cannot but feel that those who wish to do justice to the beauty of its scenery must visit these mountains and valleys for themselves” (13).

This claim, or disclaimer rather, that texts can never capture a place is a standard convention of travel writing later practiced by Lilian Bell, Vernon Lee, et al; and it is the very antithesis of the guidebook, which attempts to capture everything about the place.

If Edwards’s proviso against absolute accuracy is not enough to counter conventional wisdom about her travelogues, she continues her “Preface” by employing the language of visual culture:

No descriptions, no sketches of mine,31 can, of necessity, convey any

adequate impression of forms so new and so fantastic—of colouring so

splendid—of atmospheric effects so unusual and so startling. To do so

would need, at all events, an abler pen and a more skilful pencil than

mine… I wish, VEDDER,32 that I could seize the weirdness and poetry of

that landscape as you would have seized it; that I could match the relative

tones of mountains, trees, and skies, CHARLES CARYLL COLEMAN,33

with your wonderful fidelity; that like you, TILTON,34 I could steep my

brush in the rose and gold of Southern sunsets. Thus, and thus only, should

the Dolomites be painted. (13-14)

Edwards draws on the language of painting and aesthetics, suggesting a much more subjective text than a “strictly faithful account” would allow, and there is certainly nothing in the preface that suggests scientific exploration.

Throughout Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys, Edwards uses the term picturesque nearly two dozen times to describe everything from panoramic views to towns, ravines, and bridges. This repeated use, more than anything else, shows both her investment in visual culture and her indebtedness to previous texts. While Murray and

31 Early editions of includ Edwards’s own illustrations, though 1890 edition includes the footnote, “The illustrations attached to the original work are necessarily omitted in the present edition” (13). 32 Elihu Vedder, an American symbolist painter best known for his illustrations of Edward FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. 33 Usually spelled “Charles Caryl Coleman,” he was an American painter of Italian scenes. 34 John Rollin Tilton was an American artist celebrated for his Turner-esque landscapes of Italy. 84

Ruskin may draw only vague allusions, Gilpin’s influence, though never mentioned by name, can be seen throughout Edwards’s travelogue wherever she gives long, detailed depictions of the panorama:

Pictorially speaking, it is a purely Italian subject, majestic, harmonious,

classical; with just sufficient sternness in the mountain forms to give

sublimity, but with no outlines abrupt or fantastic enough to disturb the

scenic repose of the composition. In the foreground we have the ravine of

the Molina spanned by a picturesque old bridge, at the farther end of

which a tiny chapel clings to an overhanging ledge of cliff. In the middle

distance, seen across an intervening chasm of misty valley, the little far-

away town of Cadore…Farthest of all, rising magnificently into the sky,

the fine pyramidal mass of Monte Pera closes in the view. For light and

shadow, for composition, for all that goes to make up a landscape in the

grand style, the picture is perfect. Nothing is wanting—not even the

foreground group to give it life for here come a couple of bullock trucks

across the bridge, as primitive and picturesque as if they had driven

straight out of the fifteenth century. It is just such a subject as Poussin

might have drawn, and Claude have coloured (113-114).

This is one of many long passages that demonstrate Edwards’s reliance on Gilpin’s rules for the picturesque. While most of these rules were absorbed into the culture of tourism and circulated through discourse, Edwards’s attention to detail shows her knowledge of the picturesque’s origins; even if she does not mention Gilpin explicitly, she does invoke his perpetual touchstones, Poussin and Claude.

In A Thousand Miles up the Nile, Edwards uses picturesque even more frequently, describing landscapes, caravans, bazaars, cities, and other visual spectacles. Edwards is writing a century after Gilpin, long after the romantic landscapes of Claude have fallen out of vogue, and after photographic realism captured the visual imagination; furthermore, she is writing about a landscape that does not correspond to the eighteenth century ideals of the picturesque. There are no rivers winding through the landscape except the Nile, and the only craggy peaks rising in the distance are the Pyramids of Giza.

One could argue that Edwards’s turn from the Dolomites to the desert marks the shift in popular usage of the term, away from Gilpin’s formulae towards its current popular usage as simply a poetic, albeit it trite, synonym for beautiful, if it were not for passages like these:

It is all so picturesque, indeed, so biblical, so poetical, that one is almost in

danger of forgetting that the places are something more than beautiful

backgrounds, and that the people are not merely appropriate figures placed

there for the delight of sketchers, but are made of living flesh and blood,

and moved by hopes, and fears, and sorrows, like our own. (288)

Even in Egypt, Edwards is keenly aware of the history and conventions of art, framing, as it were, her own descriptions within the terminology of landscape painting. There is, on the one hand, a deferral to picturesque viewing—the tourist will always see through the eyes of Gilpin to some extent. On the other hand, there is also an admission of the picturesque’s inherent flaw, the practice of seeing humans as mere ornaments.

For Edwards’s part, however, the picturesque is not diminished, but seemingly enriched, as she continues to describe scenes, landscapes, and even people using a very

conventional vocabulary, writing of “mud dwellings, here clustered together in hollows, there perched separately,” “wild figures of half-naked athletes,” “dusky women decked with barbaric ornaments,” and “little naked children like live bronzes” (288). As in Italy,

Egypt’s poverty is easily aestheticized, with the additional benefit of also being exoticized. Edwards is able to take the imaginative cartography of the picturesque, which seems entirely dependent upon ragged mountains, cliff-perched villages, and lush foliage, and overlay it upon a seemingly antithetical topography.

Edith Wharton’s “Parentheses of Travel”

Whereas Edwards often presents her travels as exploration, but just as frequently writes about popular tourist destinations, American novelist Edith Wharton succeeds in writing about a region that is virtually unmediated by texts. In her preface to In Morocco

(1920), Wharton writes, “Having begun my book with the statement that Morocco still lacks a guide-book, I should have wished to take the first step towards remedying that deficiency” (vii). The only texts then available to tourists were French histories, like M.

Augustin Bernard’s Le Maroc, which Wharton references frequently. The fault with

Bernard’s text, as Wharton sees it, is that it is too concerned with facts and “leaves out the visual and picturesque side, except in so far as the book touches on the always picturesque life of the people” (xi). Still, In Morroco is not overly concerned with the picturesque, or at least not explicitly so. Unlike Edwards, Wharton does not pull out a list of Gilpin’s rules to apply to the landscape of North Africa, choosing instead to write about places she visits, things she sees, and people she meets. In the end, it is far from the objective and factual guidebook she set out to compile.

At Wharton’s writing, there would have been very few tourists seeking a guidebook to Morocco, or anywhere else, for that matter, as the world was embroiled in the Great War. By 1915, neither Murray nor Baedeker were producing new guidebooks, and both firms went into a decline during the 1920s. While the war destroyed much of

Europe, it had, in a sense, preserved Morocco from the effects of mass tourism. As

Wharton warns in her preface, “[T]he impression of mystery and remoteness which the country now produces must inevitably vanish with the approach of the [Cook’s] ‘Circular

Ticket.’ Within a few years far more will be known of the past of Morocco, but that past will be far less visible to the traveller than it is to-day” (ix). Despite attempting to write a guidebook for the coming influx of tourists, Wharton also feels the pressure to capture what is slipping away, or what will soon slip away.

When she travels to Italy, Wharton has no interest in writing a guidebook, attempting instead to venture off the proverbial beaten track to places untouched by tourists and unmentioned by Murray or Baedeker. This may be the most conventional of all touristic practices, and can certainly be read as an extension of the explorer-adventurer role Wharton adopts in Morocco. However, Italian Backgrounds (1905) articulates the performance as dissent against the vade mecums:

One of the rarest and most delicate pleasures of the continental tourist is to

circumvent the compiler of his guide-book. The red volumes which

accompany the traveller through Italy have so completely anticipated the

most whimsical impulses of their readers that is now almost impossible to

plan a tour of exploration without finding, on reference to them, that their

author has already been over the ground, has tested the inns, measured the

kilometers, and distilled from the massive tomes of Kugler, Burckhardt

and Morelli35 a portable estimate of the local art and architecture. Even the

discovery of incidental lapses scarcely consoles the traveller for the

habitual accuracy of his statements; and the only refuge left from his

omniscience lies in approaching the places he describes by a route which

he has not taken. (85)

Wharton does not mention either guidebook by name, though given her 1905 publication, she is mostly likely referring to Baedeker. And this is not a deferral on her part: she is not saying, as Dickens does, go read your guidebook, but rather urging a rebellion against them. Throughout her Italian memoirs, Wharton avoids “habitual accuracy” (85) in favor of “momentary escapes from the expected” (86), but it seems the most obvious solution to the problem of circumvention—to simply explore without referencing or even using a guidebook—seems to not occur to her.

At the same time, what makes Wharton so interesting is the ways in which she uses the language of visual culture to simultaneously deconstruct the authority of the guidebook and the primacy of the picturesque gaze, while still relying on that vocabulary:

“As with the study of Italian pictures, so it is with Italy herself. The country is divided, not in partes tres, but in two: a foreground is the property of the guide-book and of its product, the mechanical sight-seer; the background, that of the dawdler, the dreamer and the serious student of Italy” (IB 177). Unlike most travel writers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Wharton is not using the picturesque as a lens through which to view Italy, but as a metaphor to deconstruct the term itself, along with the practice of

35 Art historians Franz Theador Kugler of Germany, Jacob Burckhardt of Switzerland, and Giovanni Morelli of Italy. 89

guidebook-tourism. She is certainly not the first to accuse guidebook-toting tourists of superficiality, but she is, to my knowledge, the only writer to describe this superficiality in terms of the picturesque. The dawdlers, dreamers, and serious students must look beyond the picturesque gaze, but she does not entirely relinquish the text either, seeing it as a prerequisite for a deeper understanding of the country: “This distinction does not imply any depreciation of the foreground. It must also be known thoroughly before the middle distance can be enjoyed: there is no short cut to an intimacy with Italy” (IB 177).

That is, the foreground, the realm of the stereotypical guidebook-led tourist, is a prerequisite for gaining a deeper knowledge of place, while intimacy, which we often associate with proximity, is farther away, in the distance. Though Wharton counters guidebook tourism and picturesque sight-seeing, she still locates the object of her gaze over there.

Wharton, it must be noted, is not guiding her readers towards an intimacy with

Italian culture or Italians. When she complains that the art of Italy has been

“conventionalized” and “stiffened into symbols” (178), she is speaking of the commodification of culture, that is, the semiotic systems that are constructed by guidebooks; however, the “life of which they [the works of art] were once the most complete expressions” (178) is not the life of the modern Italian, but rather is the artist of an imagined past. Wharton is one of the few aesthetes to praise Baroque art, and unlike her contemporaries, she holds ancient Roman art in higher regard than medieval art. That is, the sights she values are often very different from those listed by either guidebooks or art critics. Wharton writes that “there is a sharp line of demarcation between the guidebook city and its background. In some cases, the latter is composed mainly of objects at

which the guide-book tourist has been taught to look askance, or rather which he has been counseled to pass by without a look” (IB 80). Again, Wharton does not reject guidebooks entirely: she objects to the sights which tourists are told to see. In other words, Wharton does not remove the textual lens; she refocuses it. The long-neglected works of art and architecture, like the temple of Minerva, become the object of her reader’s gaze, while the frequented sights, like the church of Saint Francis, become blurry in the foreground.

To continue with the photography analogy, for Wharton, intimacy with Italy requires not only a refocusing of the lens, but also a longer exposure: “As Italy is divided into foreground and background, so each city has its perspective; its premier plan asterisked for the hasty traveller, its middle distance for the ‘happy few’ who remained more than three days, and its boundless horizon for the idler who refuses to measure art by time” (IB 179). Wharton joins Ruskin in his disdain for “tourist hurry,” but, in many ways, her own text merely rewrites the guidebook, listing sites, but always ends with the explicit disclaimer that Italy is not found in a book.

In Italian Backgrounds, Wharton devotes a lengthy list of sights to see in

“Picturesque Milan,” as she names her chapter on the city, but then concludes her chapter by saying:

But these are among the catalogued riches of the city. The guide-books

point to them, they lie in the beaten track of sight-seeing, and it is rather in

the intervals between such systematized study of the past, in the

parentheses of travel, that one obtains those more intimate glimpses which

help to compose the image of each city, to preserve its personality in the

traveller’s mind. (170)

Wharton’s choice of words will be amusing to anyone who is familiar with Baedeker, as his habit of relegating practical visitor’s information to parenthetical phrases within long, florid descriptions of vistas is widely derided by critics of guidebooks. First, Wharton catalogs, then she criticizes the practice of cataloging, which is largely responsible for constructing the sign system employed in sight-seeing. As Sarah Bird Wright explains,

Wharton:

is zealous about seeking out and describing little-known ‘by-ways’ of

travel (generating, paradoxically, attention that might invoke the dreaded

Baedeker star and attract more visitors)…She produces and validates a

collateral ‘abroad,’ not represented in guidebooks…Should this ‘abroad’

attract large numbers of visitors, however, then the privileged, quasi-

solitary wandering may be eradicated by mass tourism. (13)

In taking to the “by-ways,” and getting “off the beaten track,” Wharton is performing a touristic convention, certainly, but, it should not be forgotten, her desire to seek out those places is also a rebellion against textual authority. If Wharton is, as Wright describes, constructing an “abroad” which is not discussed in guidebooks, she must first deconstruct the guidebook form. Of course, this becomes a Catch-22, as her own travelogues become textual mediations. These writers, as Dann observes:

establish a new hierarchy of priorities, a system conjured up by the author.

Furthermore, should readers take his [or, in this case, “her”] counsel to

heart, the alternative attractions could well become tourist sights, and the

anti-tourist would become a tourist subject to additional control

mechanisms. (86)

This does not seem to enter into Wharton’s consideration, perhaps believing that tourists who would follow her book might be somewhat more cultured that those who would follow Baedeker.

While Wharton does not express regret for attracting tourists to previously unfrequented villages, what she does seem to recant, according to her memoir, A

Backward Glance, is having produced texts at all. After reading Bernard Berenson,36

Wharton remembers, “lovers of Italy learned that aesthetic sensibility may be combined with the sternest scientific accuracy, and I began to feel almost guilty for having read

Pater and even Symonds with such zest, and ashamed of having added my own facile vibrations to the chorus” (141). As she read the works of Berenson, Alphonse Bertillon, and Giovanni Morelli,37 she was intrigued by the definitive, scientific, and quantifiable counter to the personal, subjective experience of art and of Italy. The “Bertillon-Morelli methods” involved measuring and classifying brushstrokes and paint samples, making the study of art purely academic. Wharton writes, “My deep contempt for picturesque books about architecture naturally made me side with those who wished to banish sentiment from the study of painting and sculpture” (141). For a while, Wharton is converted to the more scientific studies of art, but while Berenson and Morelli removed sentimentality and the picturesque from the study of Italian art, they missed something of “the very soul of the work” (141), which can be enjoyed by viewers with no training or expertise. Thus,

36 Bernard Berenson was an American art historian who stressed a scientific study of art, for instance, early studies of brushstrokes to authenticate Renaissance art. The stress on authenticity presented a definitive, and even scientific, challenge to those who stressed subjectivity in favor of catalogs, experts, and authorities. 37 Alphonse Bertillon was a French photographer credited as the inventor of the mugshot. Bertillon developed a system that methodically photographed, measured, and catalogued criminals. Giovanni Morelli developed a similar method of measurement and identification for art. Like Berenson, Morelli was a renowned expert on authenticating works of art by looking at brushstrokes or other “shorthand” signs of an artist’s methodology. 93

Wharton eventually returns to an appreciation of art based on aesthetics and personal response:

There remains a field of observation wherein the mere lover of beauty can

open the eyes and sharpen the hearing of the receptive traveller, as Pater,

Symonds and Vernon Lee had done to readers of my generation. The

combination of gifts required is seldom found, and the volumes which

guided my early wanderings were succeeded by minor dithyrambs to

which I never again felt tempted to add my own pipe of ecstasy; but there

is certainly room for the gifted amateur in the field of artistic

impressions—if only he is sufficiently gifted. (141)

Thus, Wharton explains when and why she abandoned travel writing as a genre, expressing similar constraints on content and expression described by her friend Henry

James. For Wharton, however, it is not that there is nothing left to be said, it is that she lacks the “gifts” to capture that elusive, unquantifiable quality of art. She leaves no doubt, though, that the next generation of travellers will need texts to guide their journeys, texts that are subjective and impressionist, rather than the “habitual accuracy” of Baedeker or the scientific inquiry of Berenson or Morelli. Wharton’s own journeys, as referenced above, were greatly influenced by Pater’s Renaissance, Symonds’s Sketches in

Italy and Greece, and, perhaps more than anything else, the “deliciously desultory volumes of Vernon Lee” (BG 140).

Vernon Lee’s Sentimental Travels

Like Symonds, Vernon Lee (neé Violet Paget) was a disciple of Pater, and, in turn, Wharton was the disciple of Lee. According to Wharton’s memoir, she travelled to

Italy with letters of introduction, hoping to meet Lee who rarely accepted visitors and spent much of her time caring for an invalid brother. Lee had initially declined the request for a meeting, until her brother expressed admiration for Wharton’s writing.

Wharton had long admired Lee’s books on art and travel, but now Lee was her guide in the flesh, introducing her to the best collectors and families in Italy. Lee’s “long familiarity with the Italian country-side” and the “wide circle of her Italian friendships”

(BG 134) gave Wharton access to sights usually enjoyed exclusively by Italian nobility or their wealthy British and American acquaintances.

Lee’s intimacy with Italy was due not only to her many years of residence, but as

Maria Frawley observes, it was also a professional necessity: “A Victorian woman who sought to establish an identity as a critic—as a spokesperson for higher values—thus had to establish a meaningful relationship with Italy” (55). Ruskin, Pater, Symonds, and

Arnold were the leading aesthetes, and in order to join their ranks, Violet Paget took a masculine name, Vernon Lee. However, this was not merely a nom de plume; she was

Vernon Lee, identifying, according to Martha Vicinus, as “a third sex, ‘not woman, not man’” (xxxi). In letters exchanged between Lee and her romantic partners,38 she is often addressed as “Vernie.” Though it is impossible to determine with certainty that Lee was a

38 The extent to which these relationships were sexual in nature is a topic of continued debate among scholars. Lee’s biographer, Vineta Colby, denies any physical involvement with these women, claiming that Lee’s “lesbian tendencies were repressed” (176). Still others, including Christa Zorn, Martha Vicinus, and Sally Newman, argue that without an explicit confirmation, which is unsurprisingly missing from the archive, one is left to read between the lines, where there is much evidence from which to infer. 95

lesbian, she was frequently criticized for being masculine in her personality, bearing, and attire.

Lee’s writing was as unconventional as her persona. Rather than denigrate tourists, she sympathized with, if not envied, them, although she was from a family that not only held tourism in low regard, but also travelling. Into the ubiquitous traveler versus tourist dichotomy, the Paget family added another, presumably superior category, the mover. In the opening pages of The Sentimental Traveller (1908), she writes of her childhood family, “We shifted our quarters invariably every six months, and, by dint of shifting, crossed Europe’s length and breadth in several directions. But this was moving, not travelling, and we contemned all travellers” (7, emphasis original). Unlike the

Ruskins, the Pagets were expatriates, and Lee spent most of her early years travelling/ moving throughout the Continent, learning the languages and customs of local peoples, many of whom were upper-middle-class, as were the Pagets. She writes of her childhood,

“I had been brought up to despise persons who travelled in order to ‘sight-see.’ We never saw any sights. We moved ourselves and our luggage regularly…But we were careful to see nothing on the way…Neither did we see anything at either end; of such things, at least, as are registered in guidebooks” (7). Instead of sight-seeing, the Pagets went about their normal routines regardless of location: “We had the art of taking the same walk, or the same sort of walk, in spite of all such differences” (8). This is perhaps exactly the sort of existence that most travel writers would aspire to, but Lee, as her tone suggests, finds it overwhelmingly dull.

The only time they read guidebooks was aloud as entertainment, as they did a guide to Paris “when they had no intention of visiting the French capital” (8). She later

adds, “[W]ell, what need was there for us to go and see those things? To do so was necessary, doubtless, for some persons without feeling or imagination” (8). Most of Lee’s childhood was spent in Rome, where the family “cast a perfunctory glance at St. Peter’s, the Coliseum, and the tomb of Keats (for, after all, we were not eccentric—only wise!)…to sum it all up, and you have, pretty nearly, what Rome meant in our eyes during those five or six winters of my childhood and adolescence” (10). If she is to be believed, her family was so far from the typical visually-oriented tourists that they might as well have had their eyes shut.

While Lee maintained her reverence for sentimentality and imagination, which characterizes her travel writing throughout her life, her own feelings about tourism and tourists become significantly more sympathetic as an adult. In the essay “The Sentimental

Traveller,” Lee makes a connection to her lack of “travel,” as opposed to moving, as the very reasons she becomes the trope her family despised: “I have grown into a Sentimental

Traveller because I have travelled not more, but less, than most folk—at all events, travelled a great deal less that I wanted” (4). Perhaps Lee can be forgiven her blunder in assuming that “most folk” had, indeed, travelled at all, for she was living at a time when

Cook was bringing a whole new class of tourists to Italy. Indeed, Lee prides herself for class-consciousness when she writes in “Of Modern Travelling:”

I would not for the world be misunderstood; I have not the faintest

prejudice against Gaze39 and Cook. I fervently desire that these gentlemen

may ever quicken trains and cheapen hotels; I am ready to be jostled in

Alpine valleys and Venetian canals by any number of vociferous tourists,

39 Henry Gaze & Sons was, from the 1850s until the late 1800s, a major travel company to rival the size and success of Thomas Cook & Son. After the elder Gaze’s death, the company survived only a few more years before declaring bankruptcy in 1903. 97

for the sake of the one, schoolmistress, or clerk, or artisan, or curate, who

may by this means have reached at last the land east of the sun and west of

the moon, the St. Brandan’s Isle40 of his or her longings. (90)

Unlike the usual class snobbery, Lee is happy to share Italy with the proverbial herds of tourists, regardless of socioeconomic background, if there is one among them that has lived an imaginative life in Italy. It is to these “poor ignorant, solitary tourists,” (103), rather than “those who have more leisure and more opportunity” that Italy reveals itself in:

a procession, a serenade, a street-fight, a fair, or a pilgrimage—which

shows the place in a particularly characteristic light which never occurs

again…Yes, Fate is friendly to those who travel rarely, who go abroad to

see abroad, not to be warm or cold, or to meet the people they may meet

anywhere else. Honour the tourist; he walks in a halo of romance. (104)

If Lee’s childhood in Rome had been spent casting only the perfunctory glance in the direction of tourist sights, preempting the tourist gaze in favor of the imagination, she seems now to prize the visual alongside the interior, imaginative experience.

In defending the romance and sentimentality of tourists, Lee is not only going against the grain of criticism, but she is also turns her criticism upon her own class of tourists, even her own family, “the cosmopolitan abroad” (90):

What I object to are the well-mannered, well-dressed, often well-informed

persons who, having turned Scotland into a sort of Hurlingham,41 are

apparently making Egypt, the Holy Land, Japan, into succursales and

40 A legendary Spanish island where time is said to stand still. 41 Exclusive sporting club in Fulham, London. 98

dependances (I like the good Swiss names evoking couriers and waiters)

of their own particularly dull portion of London and Paris and New York.

(90)

Lee’s “cosmopolitans” are those, like the Paget family, who were able to travel from place to place without breaking with their own customs, social circle, or mind-set. Just as the Pagets were able to have the same walk regardless of locale, so too these tourists leave their cosmopolitan cities only to re-establish the same communities, tarnishing places celebrated for their unique histories, mythologies, and cultures.

To those who would argue that it was not the cosmopolitan but the mass tourist that had made European capitals lose their charm, Lee retorts in The Sentimental

Traveller, “If places have become hackneyed, it is only in our own eyes and soul, because we see their commonplace side and the rubbish of everyday detail which we bring with us” (233). Lee’s argument parallels her friend Oscar Wilde’s condemnation of “the rage of Caliban seeing his own face in the glass” (xxiii). Whereas Wilde argues that art reveals the critic rather than the artist, Lee writes, “There might have been tourists about, but we did not see, nor need any one see, them, who is not a tourist himself” (Sentimental 234).

It is worth remembering here that she did not see herself as a tourist or a cosmopolitan.

She was a sentimental traveller, self-identifying as the metensomatic role, and here her tone towards mass tourism shifts:

And as to tourists, it is my scientific opinion that they lurk reading last

year’s illustrated papers or exchanging intelligence with each other, or at

all events disappear into appropriate holes and corners of the real universe

as soon as the Sentimental Traveller is abroad. Or is it, perhaps, that the

true Sentimental Traveller wonders about in places existing only in his

own fancy, and safe, therefore, from all profane intrusion? (233)

Lee’s sympathy for the tourist in comparison to the anti-tourist, or traveller, seems to dissipate in comparison to the “sentimental traveller.” She is no longer concerned with the imaginative schoolmistress or the “haze of romance;” instead, she turns to the pejorative animal imagery so frequently used by critics; they “lurk” in “holes,” gossiping about fellow travellers, just as they would gossip about their neighbors at home. “[L]ast year’s illustrated newspapers” seem to stand in for the red-covered guidebooks that so frequently mark the tourist’s presence. They are behind the times and behind the fashion, more interested in cheap broadsheets than serious literature.

For her own part, Lee would rather tourists/travellers not read at all, not Baedeker or Ruskin, or any other text that will alter their viewpoint, rather than feeding their imagination. Again, it is the personal, interior, and subjective experience that is most admired:

My main contention then is merely that, before visiting countries and

towns in the body, we ought to have visited them in the spirit; otherwise I

fear we might as well sit still at home. I do not mean that we should read

about them; some persons I know affect to extract a kind of pleasure from

it; but to me it seems like dull work. One wants to visit unknown lands in

company, not with other men’s descriptions, but with one’s own wishes

and fancies. (“Of Modern Travelling” 91)

Throughout her writings, Lee seems preoccupied with questioning the usefulness of travelling abroad. Why change locations only to have the same walk? Why leave the

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metropolis only to replicate the urban society in distant towns? Why not just stay at home? She never provides answers nor definitively says why tourists should venture outside of New York or London. Ultimately, she concludes that experience should always be personal, not a subverted gaze channeled through another’s descriptions or texts, presumably not even her writings.

Lee’s own reading is seldom mentioned in her travel writing. Though Pater’s influence is deeply felt, his name is rarely referenced. Even Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, to which her title pays homage, only elicits a few references of little consequence in her moments of semi-metempsychosis. There are occasional references to Ruskin, whom Lee greatly admired, but she does not feel the same burden of his texts as James and Pennell, though she defends him in her essay “Ruskinism,” praising his views of art while pointing out shortcomings in his “moral attitude:” “His truths and his errors are alike far higher than the truths and errors of his fellow-workers” (197). In The Sentimental

Traveller, Lee aligns herself with what she sees as his rejection of the picturesque: “In

‘Modern Painters’ [there is] a positive remorse for any signs of complacency towards picturesque squalor of which he may have been guilty. Such sins and backslidings I too have doubtless committed” (253). Lee describes only one such instance of her own guilt in the small French town of Fribourg, where she encounters:

a stumbling block to my poor traveller’s virtue, and it is here…that I have

had my lesson of what ‘picturesqueness’ may mean…My Fribourg friends

have often told me that it is a nest of pauperism and sickness, and have

wondered a little at my hankerings after it. But so it is: the place is

matchlessly picturesque. (254)

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What Lee finds most picturesque, however, is not the poverty or ill-health of the villagers; in fact, there is no attention paid to the people inhabiting the scene. Instead, she sees meadows and pastures, elevated paths, rocks, fir trees, stone bridges, and a winding river. Just like so many other picturesque tourists before her, Lee has depopulated the scene and sees only the landscape painting behind it.

What makes Lee’s case so unusual, however, is the ways in which she shifts from that landscape into an imaginary reverie, conflating, as she often does, the picturesque with a fantasy. She imagines that the creatures emerging after a rain are witches convening for “some Sabbath—a Sabbath of contagion, of diphtheria and phthisis” (256).

Near the river lies an abandoned cottage with “delicate Gothic stone windows.” Lee writes, “And if that house is not the house of the Town-Witch-Finder (of whom Gottfried

Keller42 has told us in his story of ‘Spiegel das Katzchen’), then my name is not Vernon

Lee!” (256) Of course, the joke here is that her name is not Vernon Lee, and neither is this the cottage from the fairy tale. If sightseeing is, as her family believed, for those without imaginations, Lee found a way to sight-see imaginatively, and, perhaps more interesting, is the fact that she compares the scene to images taken from reading, specifically reading in German, which marks her class and level of education. The fact that she moves so quickly from sight to an imaginary interpretation of the sight and then to fairy tale text puts Lee’s “subverted gaze” at one step further away from the actual sight.

42 Gottfried Keller (1819-1890) was a Swiss short story writer. 102

In the final chapter of The Sentimental Traveller, entitled “The Keepsake”43 after the nineteenth-century literary annual, Lee returns to the subject of the role of literature in tourism. She recounts having read travel articles written by a pedantic and peripatetic former clergyman. Lee explains, “He must have been a Sentimental Traveller, probably without guessing it; and… must have ordained the small reader of his into being another”

(280). Lee continues:

And this belief is of great comfort whenever, as often happens, it is borne

in upon me that no description can make you see things unless you have

seen them before; and that, of all vain dilettanteish [sic] writings, these

essays of mine must therefore be the most dilettanteish and futile,

particularly to the very readers with whom I wish to share my impressions,

those, namely, who have but little opportunity of seeing the countries, or

at least the places I have written about. It is lamentably certain that I

cannot make them see what I describe. (280)

These apologetics will be familiar to frequent readers of travel narratives, particularly those written by women. Just as Wharton self-deprecatingly references her “facile vibrations,” “minor dithryabs,” and “pipe of ecstasy,” her predecessor includes disclaimers of her own. However, unlike James and Wharton, or Seaton and Savoy for that matter, Lee is not speaking about the failure of originality in an overly-textualized subject, or even the linguistic inevitably of repetition; instead, she complains about the failure of language itself—the inability to express the visual, imaginary, sentimental, or subjective experience in words. This is particularly problematic because, as Lee points

43 The Keepsake was a literary annual published from 1829 to 1857. Mary and Percy Shelley and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were regular contributors. Lee incorrectly remembers reading an 1825 edition. 103

out, The Sentimental Traveller is not written for travellers at all. Just as her family read the guidebook to Paris when they had no intention of travelling there, Lee’s intended audience is armchair travellers, not those who would tarnish their imaginations by preparatory reading.

Although The Sentimental Traveller was Lee’s only explicit travelogue, she also published a wide range of essays, letters, and journal extracts, several of which include remarks on the inadequacy of language. In The Spirit of Rome: Leaves from a Diary

(1906), Lee explains that the pages are “leaves from [her] diary” without extensive editing:

I cannot focus Rome into any definite perspective, or see it in the colour of

one mood…One cannot sit down and attempt a faithful portrait of Rome;

at least I cannot. And the value of these notes to those who love Rome, or

are capable of loving it, is that they express, in however stammering a

manner, what I said to myself about Rome; or, perhaps, if the phrase is not

presumptuous, what Rome, day after day and year after year, has said to

me. (10)

To paraphrase James on his poetic devotion to Venice, for Lee, a true lover of Rome, writing of Rome is always in order. The aesthetic language she employs—“perspective,”

“colour,” “faithful portrait”—shows the connection she sees between writing and painting, yet neither medium can accurately represent a place or express sentiment either, but can only give the reader an impression of what the writer saw or felt.

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The World as Seen by Lilian Bell

At the turn of the twentieth century, the prolific American writer Lilian Bell was known for such titles as The Love Affairs of an Old Maid (1893) and Why Men Remain

Bachelors: And Other Luxuries (1906), as well as a satirical advice book From a Girl’s

Point of View (1897). Her travelogue, As Seen by Me (1900), was written after an extensive voyage throughout Europe, Russia, Turkey, and Egypt. To my knowledge, there has not been a single scholarly work, outside of my own, to examine her work.

Bell’s travelogue is, to be generous, badly written, filled with personal anecdotes and conversations transcribed word for word in order to show her own wit, reading like a poor imitation of Wilde. Yet what she says about texts and tourists is not so unlike the more skillful James, Pennell, or Lee.

Bell seems to be familiar with and disdainful of vade mecums and the tourists who read them, describing one companion as “a walking Baedeker—red cover, gold letters, and all. She was ‘doing Europe.’ She read her guide-book, she saw nothing beyond”

(297). Bell takes particular pride in not being a Baedeker-tourist, but she is not an anti- tourist either. Most of the time, she seems unimpressed with the sights of the Continent; for instance, she is disappointed by Naples because the travel literature she reads is so hyperbolic:

Poets have written reams of poetry about [Naples], travellers have sent

home pages of rhapsodies about it, tourists have conscientiously “done”

the town, with their heads cocked on one side and their forefingers on a

paragraph in Baedeker, but just because of this, because everybody on

earth who has ever been to Naples—man or woman, Jew or Gentile, black

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or white, bond or free—has wept and gurgled and had hysteria over its

mild and placid beauty, is one reason why I find it somewhat tame. (276,

emphasis original)

Bell’s response to Naples is similar to those expressed by James and Pennell when

Venice does not match Ruskin’s description. On the one hand, Bell is disappointed because her own experience does not compete with hyperbolic travel literature. On the other hand, her disappointment is not just with the aesthetic and sentimental response of previous writers: she is disappointed because they have written at all. Whereas James always finds reasons to write about overly textualized sites, Bell is unimpressed with

Venice, writing about a shopping excursion instead. This may be because Bell is a tourist passing through cities, rather than taking months-long leisurely sojourns. She does not stay long enough to feel quite at home, in the same way that James or Pennell do in

Venice, for instance. Nor is Bell an aesthete, which also sets her apart from most the travel writers discussed here. Though she sometimes adopts an explorer/adventurer role in places like Egypt or Constantinople, in Italy, she performs a role unmentioned by

Seaton: she is the shopper-consumer. To some extent the consumer is implicit in any touristic role, but in Lee’s case, it is much more explicit: the sights are not as important as the bargains.

Just as James responds to the over textualization of Italy by writing about “the trivial and the obvious” (Italian Hours 58), Bell enjoys commonplace activities: “From a dozen different recollections of Naples, eleven of which you may read in your red- covered Baedeker or Recollections of Italy, or Leaves from my Note-Book, or Memories of Blissful Hours, similar productions, I have most poignantly to remember our shopping

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experiences in Naples” (279). The plethora of books already written, not just about Italy, but even mentioning Italy, prevents Bell from being able to say anything original on the subject. Everyone, as Bell notes, has already “wept and gurgled,” and she refers her reader to those texts rather than adding to them.

Bell also includes chapters on Constantinople, Cairo, and the Nile, destinations that were still less frequented by tourists and even less so by women travelling alone. The disappointment Bell feels at reading these places through texts, especially inaccurate texts, prompts her to include a preface in which she anticipates any claims of inaccuracy with an “Author’s Apology”: “The frank conceit of the title of this book will, I hope, not prejudice my friends against it…but will fasten the blame of all inaccuracies, if such there be, upon the offender—myself. This [book]… presents people and things, not as you saw them, perhaps, or as they really are, but only As Seen By Me” (n. pag.). Bell’s preface, like Lee’s, show the anxiety that travel writers experience at knowing that their text can never be an exact reproduction of place, or even entirely of what they feel. Savoy argues that, “If the pleasures of visual engagement are continually qualified or dismantled by the anxieties which attend representation…then travel writing offers a significant and largely unexplored archive of the late nineteenth century’s obsession with sight and the limits of bringing optical experience to text” (298). This explanation seems especially appropriate, not only because of Bell’s title, but also given the optical nature of the picturesque in nineteenth-century tourism.

The ability to accurately describe experience is, according to Savoy,

“displaced…by the burden of prior travel writing, the completeness of which pre-empts or forecloses the possibility of original description” (288). In writing these books, the

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authors’ own Hours, Travels, and Rambles become the texts through which the experiences of other tourists and travel writers are filtered, as the layers of mediation multiply exponentially. Yet so many of these writers—James, Pennell, Wharton, Lee, and

Bell—continue to write as a counter response to, even subversion of, vade mecums and the proliferation of travel writing. These travelogues are not, as many critics have suggested, failures of originality or authenticity, but are instead expressions of individuality.

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Chapter 3

“Somebody else’s sieve”: Tourism, Textual Mediation,

and the Picturesque Gaze

Everybody was walking about St. Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody

else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody

else’s sieve…The whole body of travellers seemed to be a collection of

voluntary human sacrifices, bound hand and foot, delivered over to Mr

Eustace and his attendants to have the entrails of their intellects arranged

according to the taste of that sacred priesthood. (Dickens, Little Dorrit

537)

Although novels fall into the category of belles lettres, they are usually overlooked in critical discussions of travel literature, which tend to favor travelogues, diaries, letters, and other non-fiction accounts. Thus, the novel’s role in the textual mediation of tourism has been largely overlooked. In many ways novels serve the same functions as guidebooks and travel writing by aiding tourists’ search for and interpretations of signs. A closer examination of how tourism functions in novels allows us to trace gradual shifts in sight-seeing practices, including the picturesque gaze, which by most accounts, had largely fallen out of fashion by the early nineteenth century.

Rachel Teukolsky is one of the few scholars that identify remnants of the picturesque well into the Victorian Period: “Though literary critics usually find that the picturesque aesthetic culminated in the nineteenth century with Romantic poetry, in fact the picturesque as a visual appreciation of nature persisted well into the later part of the

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century in the form of new prints and reproducible images available after 1820” (32).

Teukolsky refers to these lasting effects in the 1820s, 30s, and 40s as the “post- picturesque” (22). While art writing, along with the aesthetic ideals it celebrates, begins to shift in the mid-nineteenth century, largely due to photographic technologies, the picturesque never disappears from tourist culture and can be seen in novels about tourism well into the twentieth century. Like Goethe’s afterimage,44 the picturesque was burned into the retina of the tourist and superimposed over every sight.

Not only do novels question the ethics of the picturesque, in much the same way as travelogues, but they also engage in the same intertextual discourse, critiquing the texts that came before, while providing new and varied representations of tourism. Many of the texts considered here, including Little Dorrit, Middlemarch, The Portrait of a

Lady, and A Room with a View, are about young, female tourists who grow increasingly dissatisfied with their travels abroad. These women are surrounded by a host of characters of varying opinions and attitudes about sight-seeing and the texts one should and should not use. How each woman responds to that influence, and their respective texts, is a defining characteristic, revealing fatal flaws and prejudices. The same is true of

Forster’s tourists, several of whom are the fictional descendants of Amy Dorrit, Dorothea

Brooke, and Isabel Archer. Throughout his fiction, Forster creates an entire catalogue of tourist types, each one more laughable than the next. These novels ridicule the superficial, textually mediated practices of tourists and anti-tourists alike, while the novels’ sympathies always lie with the unconventional tourists who often find their most rewarding experiences by abandoning texts altogether.

44 See Goethe’s Theory of Colour and Jonathan Crary’s Techniques of the Observer. 110

Tourism, Tourist Archetypes, and Textual Mediation in Little Dorrit

One of the most widely read novels to take on tourism is Charles Dickens’s Little

Dorrit (1855-57). The first issue in its original serialized form was published about nine years after Dickens’s travelogue Pictures from Italy, and it reveals his continued fascination with and frequent disdain of tourism. The second book of Little Dorrit, which describes the Dorrits’ Grand Tour, opens within the “Darkness and Night…creeping up to the highest ridges of the Alps” (544). The sublime panorama of the Swiss Alps is at first jarring after the barren prison yard of Marshalsea, yet even in the Alps there are still traces of the picturesque, as Dickens describes the travellers’ mules “ascending the broken staircase of a gigantic ruin” (476). This image is also a reminder of the narrow staircase leading to the Dorrits’ Marshalsea apartment, and one of the first indications that life outside of prison is remarkably similar to life within the prison. Like the “smoke plagues of London” (48) from the first book of the novel, the Alpine atmosphere is just as impenetrable: “The breath of men was cloud, the breath of the mules was cloud, the lights were encircled by cloud, speakers close at hand were not seen for cloud, though their voices and all other sounds were surprisingly clear” (456). Just as before, the Dorrits seem incapable of escaping even the oppressive air of London, or perhaps the novel suggests that every tourist destination is as foul as the Marshalsea.

Dickens’s depiction of the Dorrits’ visit to the Great St. Bernard Pass is based on his own first-hand experience as a tourist. In a letter to John Forster written in September of 1846, Dickens describes St. Bernard as a “great hollow on the top of a range of dreadful mountains” (Letters 172), which sounds perhaps even less welcoming than the depiction of the monastery in Little Dorrit. In fact, much of the Dorrits’ European tour is

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based on Dickens’s own travels, including his gruesome description of “the dead travellers found upon the mountain”: “The mother, storm-belated many winters ago, still standing in the corner with her baby at her breast; the man who had frozen with his arm raised to his mouth in fear or hunger, still pressing it with his dry lips after years and years. An awful, company, mysteriously come together!” (Little Dorrit 457) This is not merely a macabre invention of Dickens’s imagination: the morgue of St. Bernard was a popular tourist attraction and was featured prominently in guidebooks. In the same letter to Forster, Dickens recounts:

Beside the convent, in a little outhouse with a grated iron door which you

may unbolt for yourself, are the bodies of people found in the snow who

have never been claimed and are withering away—not laid down, or

stretched out, but standing up, in corners and against walls; some erect and

horribly human, with distinct expressions on their faces; some sunk down

on their knees; some dropping over on one side; some tumbled down

altogether, and presenting a heap of skulls and fibrous dust. There is no

other decay in that atmosphere; and there they remain during the short

days and long nights, the only human company out of doors, withering

away by grains, and holding ghastly possession of the mountain where

they died. (Letters 172)

While the scene takes up only a small space in the novel, the detailed letter shows how deeply he was moved by the morgue, highlighting the connections between Dickens the tourist and Dickens the novelist. In fact, there is very little distinction at all between the roles; Dickens, like Henry James and E.M. Forster, critiques tourism from within, a

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position that makes each novelist complicit with the sight-seeing practices he disdains.

The letter to John Forster shows the proleptic nature of Dickens’s writing—his experiences abroad become the experiences of his fictional tourists. The morgue clearly had a profound impact on Dickens, writing to John Forster “I wish to God you could see that place” (Letters 172), and the image of the frozen maternal embrace is still etched in his mind nine years later when writing Little Dorrit, blurring the permeable boundaries between travel writing and fiction.

When Dickens finally turns from the dead travellers to introduce the living, he does so by stages, not using the names of the characters but rather epithets like “the insinuating traveller” (460), “the artistic traveller” (463), and “the completely-dressed traveller” (463). On the one hand, this is Dickens’s distinctive way of tagging characters with a particular descriptive or recognizable phrase, a technique used throughout his body of work. On the other hand, he is also introducing particular tourist archetypes. Mr.

Dorrit, here called “the Chief,” but easily recognizable by his frequent interjection of

“ha,” is asked by “the insinuating traveller,” “New to the mountains perhaps?” (460), the insinuation being that the Dorrits are not well-travelled and, thus, uncultured and nouveau riche. The haughty “insinuating traveller” is ubiquitous among tourists for his class snobbery. Likewise, the “artistic traveller” is a common figure in tourist parties, usually concerned with local color and finding views to sketch. Yet one of the most prominent tourist-types, not only in Dickens, but in any fictional critique of tourism is “the completely-dressed traveller,” who is overly concerned with decorum and the opinions of others.

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“The completely-dressed traveller,” first introduced as an “elderly lady, who was the model of accurate dressing, and whose manner was perfect, considered as a piece of machinery” (460), is soon identified as Mrs. General, a woman whose name, in classic

Dickensian manner, serves double-duty as her most appropriate descriptive. Mrs. General lacks specificity or depth: “everything having been surface and varnish, and show without substance” (528). In Dickens’s canon, Mrs. General is akin to Mr. and Mrs.

Veneering, the socially mobile couple in Our Mutual Friend who perpetually throw dinner parties in order to maintain public appearances. She is also an example of a particular type of tourist who pretends to possess a great knowledge of the places they visit, while also relying heavily on their favorite guidebook. She visits St. Bernard not because of its historical or religious significance: “’But like other inconvenient places,’ she observed, ‘it must be seen. As a place much spoken of, it is necessary to see it’”

(460). Mrs. General’s rationale draws attention to the subtle and often ignored relationship between the optic obsession and the aural—the stereotypical tourist not only has an eye subverted to the guidebook, but also an ear pitched to receive the opinions from the proverbial they.

Mrs. General, Dickens soon explains, is a widow who has been hired by Mr.

Dorrit as a travelling companion for his daughters, Amy and Fanny, providing both cultural and social guidance suitable to women of their newly acquired class. In her previous employment as a young lady’s companion, Mrs. General had already “made a tour of Europe, and saw most of that extensive miscellany of objects which it is essential that all persons of polite cultivation should see with other people’s eyes, and never with their own” (473). In Mrs. General’s case, those eyes belong to John Chetwode Eustace,

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author of A Classical Guide Through Italy (1813). Eustace had been popular with upper- class tourists in the early nineteenth century, offering not only the most complete guide for the liberally educated, but also “moral improvement” (67). Mrs. General’s experience of travel has been so heavily informed and mediated by Eustace, that she can do little more than mimic his instructions and judgments: “I have pointed out to [Amy] that the celebrated Mr. Eustace, the classical tourist, did not think much of [Venice]; and that he compared the Rialto, greatly to its disadvantage, with Westminster and Blackfriars

Bridges” (498).45 In quoting Eustace, Mrs. General combines all of the worst attributes of tourists—superficiality, class consciousness, and national egotism—into one, while also showing Dickens’s familiarity with and open criticism of Eustace’s text.

Little Dorrit was serialized from 1855-57, some two decades after Murray had become the guidebook of choice for mass tourists, but, as John Pemble points out,

Dickens writes of Eustace in order to be historically accurate to the novel’s 1830s setting:

“What he really had in mind were the ‘hundreds of English people with hundreds of

Murray’s Guide Books’46 that he had seen in Rome in Holy Week in 1845” (71). By basing his satire on personal observations, Dickens shows how tourists respond to textual mediation, whether from Eustace or Murray. Once the Dorrits reach Rome, Dickens writes:

Everybody was walking about St. Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody

else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody

else’s sieve. Nobody said what anything was, but everybody said what the

45 The full quote from Eustace is as follows: “The celebrated Rialto is a single but very bold arch thrown over the Gran-Canale; and though striking from its elevation, span and solidity, yet it sinks almost into insignificance when compared with the beautiful bridge Della Trinita, at Florence, or with the superb, and far more extensive structures of Blackfriars’ and Westminster” (173). 46 Pemble takes this quote from The Letters of Charles Dickens, iv, edited by K. Tillotson (Oxford, 1977). 115

Mrs Generals, Mr Eustace, or somebody else said it was. The whole body

of travellers seemed to be a collection of voluntary human sacrifices,

bound hand and foot, delivered over to Mr Eustace and his attendants to

have the entrails of their intellects arranged according to the taste of that

sacred priesthood. (537)

The tourists’ visual experience (as well as the aural experience) is always mediated, whether by Eustace’s sieve, or later, by Murray’s, leaving the reader to wonder to what extent the sights of Rome were actually visible at all. If tourists travel in order to sight- see and verify their guidebook, the tourists in Dickens are left visually impaired. Instead, they become “hosts of tongue-tied and blindfolded moderns…carefully feeling their way, incessantly repeating Prunes and Prisms, in the endeavour to set their lips according to the received form” (537).

Furthermore, in Dickens’s description of “the whole body of travellers” in Rome, there is not a whole tourist body visible, but an assemblage of disabled or impaired parts: tied tongues, muted lips, and blindfolded eyes. The guidebook is the prosthetic “cork legs,” which instead of providing support, encumber the tourists’ mobility, just as they are “bound hand and foot.” The “entrails of their intellect” are rearranged to parrot received knowledge through disembodied lips. The tourists’ fragmented bodies mirror the

“the rugged remains” of the city in which they tour, which Dickens describes as “a city where everything seemed to be trying to stand still for ever on the ruins of something else”47 (536), a description which recalls the gruesome party of frozen travellers.

47 This imagery of ruins standing upon ruins is frequently repeated throughout Dickens’s novels. Similar descriptions are used to describe Mrs. Clennam’s house in Little Dorrit and Tom-All-Alone’s in Bleak House. 116

It is only in Dickens’s novel that the metaphors and language of tourism are reversed—tourists who are normally criticized for superficial sight-seeing and hurried movement from one city to the next, are made blinded and immobile in Little Dorrit. And the railroad, the most explicit example of modern mobility, becomes a metaphor for stagnant thought, as Mrs. General “had a little circular set of mental grooves or rails, on which she started little trains of other people’s opinions, which never overtook one another, and never got anywhere” (475). In Rome, Mrs General “was in her element.

Nobody had an opinion. There was a formation of surface going on around her on an amazing scale, and it had not a flaw of courage or honest free speech in it” (537).

Tourism, even from the early days of the Grand Tour, was meant to form a surface, that is, to polish manners and finish education, yet this emphasis on surface is also tourism’s most common criticism.

Perhaps the only similarity between Mrs. General and Amy Dorrit is that Amy never really goes anywhere either, but is always imprisoned in the Marshalsea. In Venice, where canals and waterways restrict Amy’s habit of solitary walks, she feels that her fellow travellers are imprisoned:

It appeared on the whole, to Little Dorrit herself, that this same society in

which they lived, greatly resembled a superior sort of Marshalsea.

Numbers of people seemed to come abroad, pretty much as people had

come into the prison; through debt, through idleness, relationship,

curiosity, and general unfitness for getting on at home…They prowled

about the churches and picture-galleries, much in the old dreary, prison-

yard manner…They paid high for poor accommodations, and disparaged a

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place while they pretended to like it: which was exactly the Marshalsea

custom…A certain set of words and phrases as much belonging to tourists

as the College and the Snuggery belonged to the jail, was always in their

mouths. (536)

Dickens does not elaborate on the tourist lexicon, but it would probably include references to guidebooks, whether Eustace or Murray, or later, Ruskin and Baedeker; and it would undoubtedly include terminology like “picturesque” and “middle distance.”

In the carriage ride through Italy, Amy Dorrit observes the scenery passing by and feels that “her present existence was a dream. All that she saw was new and wonderful, but it was not real; it seemed to her as if those visions of mountains and picturesque countries might melt away at any moment” (488). Like Ruskin who feels that “antiquity is no dream” (Vol. 4, 4), Amy cannot clearly see Italy for what it is, but rather than seeing

Italy’s past, she only sees her own past everywhere she looks.

Amy’s Italy appears as a beautiful panorama of decay, where “misery and magnificence stood wrestling with each other upon every rood of ground in the prospect, no matter how widely diversified” (489). The use of “prospect” and “diversified” shows his indebtedness to Gilpin, but Dickens’s definition of the picturesque is improved by his sense of social consciousness and responsibility. Dickens writes in Pictures from Italy,

“[L]et us, as our duty, try to associate a new picturesque with some faint recognition of man’s destiny and capabilities” (222), yet Amy cannot see past the misery; she sees only

“damp-stained” walls and chambers of “desolate proportions” (490) and “beggars of all sorts everywhere: pitiful, picturesque, hungry, merry: children beggars and aged beggars”

(490). Instead of admiring the beauty of the scenery, Amy recognizes the picturesque but

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is only reminded of the Dorrits’ recent poverty. At the core of Dickens’s critique, however, is not just the contrast between beauty and poverty, but the aesthetic system which makes poverty a prerequisite to picturesque beauty.

The reader, however, might be somewhat distracted from this critique by

Dickens’s insistence on showing Amy’s suffering, rather than that of poor Italians. Lost in her own contemplations, Amy is unaware that she has become an object for other tourists’ gaze. When she slips away from her family’s gaiety to wonder the canals alone,

Dickens does not even mention the necessity of a gondolier for enabling Amy’s perpetual roaming. Instead, tourists notice only Amy: “Social people in other gondolas began to ask each other who the little solitary girl was whom they passed, sitting in her boat with folded hands, looking so pensively and wonderingly about her” (491). Even when Amy stays at home, presumably secluded upon her own balcony, “she soon began to be watched for, and many eyes in passing gondolas were raised, and many people said,

There was the little figure of the English girl who was always alone” (491). Like her balcony of “massive stone darkened by the ages, built in a wild fancy which came from the East to the collection of wild fancies” (491), Amy becomes just another element of

Gothic architecture to be spotted by sight-seeing tourists.

“Seeing so much at once”: Dorothea Brooke and the Anxieties of Tourism

Amy Dorrit is a type of literary tourist who cannot escape her past or troubles no matter how far she ventures from home. In many ways Amy is a prototype for Dorothea

Brooke in George Eliot’s Middlemarch (serialized 1871-72), and, later, Isabel Archer in

Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady. When Dorothea first appears in Italy, she is seen

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through the eyes of Will Ladislaw and a young German artist, who watch her unawares and compare her to the statue of reclining Ariadne:

They were just in time to see another figure standing against a pedestal

near the reclining marble: a breathing blooming girl, whose form, not

shamed by Ariadne, was clad in Quakerish grey drapery…She was not

looking at the sculpture, probably not thinking of it: her large eyes were

fixed dreamily on a streak of sunlight which fell across the floor. (189)

Like Amy, Dorothea is the object for others’ gaze, while her own travels are contemplative rather than scopic, looking inward rather than across the landscape; and, like Amy, Dorothea would rather be alone, driving out into the country around Rome

“away from the oppressive masquerade of ages, in which her own life too seemed to become a masque with enigmatic costumes” (193). The language that Eliot uses to describe Dorothea’s experience of Rome seems somewhat repetitive after reading Little

Dorrit: she is overcome with the “stupendous fragmentariness” of Rome, which

“heightened the dreamlike strangeness of bridal life” (193).

Both women are conducted through Italy by ineffective guides. Mr. Casaubon, with his constant deferral to what “most persons think it is worth while to visit” (197), would have been a much more fitting match for Mrs. General, his “dried preparation, a lifeless embalmment of knowledge” (196) better suited to her “Prunes and Prisms.”

Dorothea goes on her honeymoon to Rome believing that the erudite Casaubon will teach her about antiquities; instead, she is left without even the benefit of Eustace. Like Little

Dorrit, Middlemarch takes place around the time of the 1832 Reform Bills, a few years before Murray’s advent, and the novel makes the significance of that chronology clear:

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In those days the world in general was more ignorant of good and evil by

forty years than it is at present. Travellers did not often carry full

information on Christian art either in their heads or their pockets; and even

the most brilliant English critic48 of the day mistook the flower-flushed

tomb of the ascended Virgin for an ornamental vase due to the painter’s

fancy for Romanticism. (188)

While Casaubon’s willingness to blindly accept public opinion could certainly be a satire of mid-century tourists who unquestioningly follow Murray, Dorothea’s response to touristic practice in those early years before the advent of the guidebook is more ambiguous. Without a guide, Dorothea finds Rome “unintelligible” (193), telling

Ladislaw, “I am seeing so much all at once, and not understanding half of it. That always makes one feel stupid. It is painful to be told that everything is very fine and not be able to feel that it is fine—something like being blind, while people talk about the sky” (206).

Dorothea suffers from a gap between what she hears and what is she is able to see for herself. The guidebook was created to fill this need, to make the Continent intelligible to the English traveller. Perhaps a later, post-Murray setting for Eliot’s novel would have offered Dorothea more understanding, and thus more enjoyment, of Rome, along with a measure of independence from the “stifling depression” (195) of her marriage. Without a guidebook, and only her husband’s refrain of what others say and think, she finds her his answers “given in a measured official tone, as of a clergyman reading according to the rubric, did not help to justify the glories of the Eternal City, or give her the hope that if she knew more about them the world would be joyously illuminated for her” (197). Eliot

48 Rosemary Ashton, in her notes on the Penguin Classics edition (1994) identifies the English critic as “William Hazlitt, in Notes of a Journey through France and Italy (1826).” (Little Dorrit 844, n. 96) 121

uses Casaubon’s failure as a guide to emphasizes his more serious failures as a husband, allowing Dorothea to fully realize the dynamics of their relationship.

While Amy travels to Italy only to be haunted by her past in the Marshalsea,

Dorothea returns home but is unable to escape the miseries of Rome:

Our moods are apt to bring with them images which succeed each other

like the magic-lantern pictures of a doze; and in certain states of dull

forlornness Dorothea all her life continued to see the vastness of St

Peter’s, the garments of the prophets and evangelists in the mosaics above,

and the red drapery which was being hung for Christmas spreading itself

everywhere like a disease of the retina. (194)

In describing Dorothea’s reminiscences, Eliot combines two common metaphors of tourism: first, her memories, like the perception of the hurried tourist, appear as a succession of flashing visual images; second, just as the tourist experience is described as a dream, these are the “magic-lantern pictures of a doze.” Finally, Elliot compares

Dorothea’s surreal memories of Rome to both the popular tourist sights and to a “disease of the retina,” which would likely prevent sight-seeing altogether.

Helena Michie, who has done extensive research on both fictional and nonfictional honeymooning couples, reads this language of the diseased eye not as a metaphor for Dorothea’s attitudes toward tourism, but as commentary on the Casaubons’ relationship. While “the sights of Europe produce in Dorothea a terrifying distortion of vision,” Michie writes, “What concerns me here…is Eliot’s explicit use of the trope of sightseeing as a way of registering sexual and social dislocations associated with the failed honeymoon” (239). Among the couples Michie studies, most of the husbands have

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been to Europe before, while the brides have not; they are seeing Europe for the first time with inexperienced eyes—a fitting metaphor for the relative sexual experience of the partners:

Since Europe figures in much Victorian fiction and nonfiction as a

metonymy for sexualized, if not sexual, experience, it would be likely that

in traveling to Europe, even if they had been there before, the women of

my sample would be revisiting—through their husbands’ eyes and in their

company—scenes of a masculinized past, traveling, as it were, to places

already marked by individual and collective gendered histories. (236)

This description seems at least partially applicable to Dorothea and Casaubon. While

Eliot gives no indication of Casaubon’s “masculinized past,” his ignorance as a guide hints towards his sexual impotence, and Dorothea is disillusioned with Rome because she is disillusioned with her married life and her husband. Casaubon relies on the opinions and judgments of others because he is marked by the antiquity he studies and by the lack of originality with which he studies.

In Rome, Casaubon is juxtaposed against Will Ladislaw, the youthful and exuberant artist, who always seems to appear in a beam of light. He finds enjoyment in

“the very miscellaneousness of Rome, which made the mind flexible with constant comparison” (212), whereas Casaubon’s mind, like Mrs. General’s, seems to run on predetermined and inflexible rails. In Will’s opinion, Rome:

saved you from seeing the world’s ages as a set of box-like partitions

without vital connections. Mr Casaubon’s studies, Will observed, had

always been of too broad a kind for that, and he had perhaps never felt any

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such sudden effect, but for himself he confessed that Rome had given him

quite a new sense of history as a whole; the fragments stimulated his

imagination and made him constructive. (212)

Will Ladislaw seems far too modern and progressive to identify with the picturesque, yet there is still something to be said of his attitudes toward tourism that he is able to see the fragmented parts of Rome yet still have a sense of the whole, recalling Coleridge’s definition. Casaubon’s Keys to All Mythologies could be seen as a failed attempt to construct a system of understanding that would make connections between disparate parts. An alternative reading is that Casaubon’s “key” was not meant to unlock understanding at all, but rather be merely an encyclopedia of sorts, which would explain

Casaubon’s disinterest in drawing connections. Either way, Casaubon’s scholarly endeavors are as sterile as his marriage. While Ladislaw would undoubtedly prove a fitting foil in any context, tourism, especially in Italy, throws that contrast into sharper relief.

While Dorothea’s experiences as a tourist are far from happy, Italy plays a vital role in her maturation, just as it does for Amy Dorrit. Pemble aptly describes Italy as “a catalyst in the emancipation of the heroine, Dorothea, from the sterile intellectualism that has consumed her husband” (155). This “emancipation” can be read as an awakening, both intellectually and sexually, that solidifies Dorothea’s attachment to Ladislaw.

Likewise, Italy offers Amy Dorrit, whose diminutive figure had always made her seem childlike, a degree of sexual maturation necessary for a happy marriage to Arthur

Clennam: “She looked something more womanly than when she had gone away, and the ripening touch of the Italian sun was visible upon her face” (791). Though neither

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Dorothea nor Amy represent stereotypical tourists, for both Dickens and Eliot, tourism becomes a trope through which the traditional marriage plot is played out.

Isabel Archer and the Evolution of Aesthetics and Tourism

The next logical step in the genealogy of fictional tourists is Isabel Archer, but

Portrait of a Lady is not James’s first, nor last, novel about tourism. Only a few years after Middlemarch appeared in serialization, and less than a year after the first bound volume, James published Roderick Hudson (1875), initiating his career-long engagement with issues of travel and tourism, which includes The American (1877), The Europeans

(1878), The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), The Golden Bowl

(1904), and the text I will discuss here, James’s 1881 novel The Portrait of a Lady. Over the course of several decades, James’s engagement with both the picturesque and with tourism evolves. When James writes Roderick Hudson, he is still deeply entrenched in the ideals of the picturesque, using the adjective several dozen times to describe everything from attire to conversation, and, in the more traditional sense, crumbling palaces and panoramic vistas. The “unhappy, underfed, unemployed” Italian communist

(Italian Hours 166) does not appear in James’s middle-distance until 1878 when he writes “Italy Revisited” for The Atlantic Monthly.

By the time James writes The Portrait of a Lady, he is aware of the gap between the ideal and the reality of life for Italians, yet he is still enamored with the picturesque gaze. While James never entirely gives up the terminology, nor its associated concepts, the word picturesque appears only a couple of times each in his later novels, The Wings of the Dove and The Golden Bowl. This appears to be a trend, not just in James’s writing

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but in the entire discourse of travel.49 On the one hand, the heavy reliance on a term that had been drawing ridicule from writers since the days of Northanger Abbey and Doctor

Syntax shows how deeply entrenched James is in the language and culture of tourism. On the other hand, James’s fiction, not only shows the evolution in language and terminology, but also reveals aesthetics in transition. Picturesque no longer refers exclusively to Gilpin’s ideal landscape painting, but it is also used to describe rustic dress, local color, eccentric behavior, romantic stories—in short, anything that can be considered charming or out of the ordinary, and thus a sign of an authentic touristic experience. When James writes The Portrait of a Lady, even the sophisticated Lord

Wharburton can be described as picturesque because he appeals to Isabel Archer’s sense of what is essentially English, but by the time Milly Theale chooses to spend her last days in Venice in The Wings of the Dove, the word had almost disappeared, even from James’s use.

Perhaps James’s own deep involvement in tourism and travel culture is what distinguishes his heroine in The Portrait of a Lady from her counterparts in Dickens and

Eliot. Unlike Amy and Dorothea, Isabel Archer is a vivacious young woman and an enthusiastic tourist: “Isabel was constantly interested and often excited; if she had come in search of local colour she found it everywhere” (120). Her cousin Ralph Touchett provides the lens through which the reader views both Isabel and her friend, the journalist

Henrietta Stackpole. Of Isabel, Ralph observes that she “had not yet seemed to him so

49 Digital Humanities research tools, such as Google NGram, allow scholars to trace the frequency with which a particular word of phrase has been used in publications surviving since 1500. Picturesque reached the peak of its use in 1900, around the time James stops using the term frequently. After over a century of increased popularity, the regularity with which picturesque appears in publication began to sharply decline until the mid-1990s, around the time James Buzard’s The Beaten Track appeared in print and initiated a resurgence in scholarly attention of its nineteenth century use in tourism. (See Coda) 126

charming as during these days spent in sounding, tourist-fashion, the deeps and shallows of the metropolitan element” (120), and Henrietta “proved to be an indefatigable sight- seer and a more good-natured critic than Ralph had ventured to hope” (121). One obvious point of difference between these women and Amy or Dorothea is that they, at least in these early scenes of the novel, are American tourists in England, visiting the British

Museum, the Tower of London, and Kensington Gardens, that is, places that are associated with English culture, rather than the poverty-ridden and Catholic regions of

Italy. Yet in some respects, Henrietta has more in common with Mrs. General’s mode of sight-seeing, though she seems less dependent upon guidebooks; Henrietta “had indeed many disappointments, and London at large suffered from her vivid remembrance of many of the cities of her native land” (121). Instead of a British tourist expressing her nationalist egotism, as is usually the case in fiction, James’s American tourist compares

England unfavorably to America, and, as in Dickens, this very act of comparison reveals a great deal about the tourist’s narrow-minded prejudices. The changes that both Isabel and Henrietta undergo by the end of the novel expose the naïveté at the heart of their earlier enthusiasm and patriotism.

When the novel moves from England to Rome, Isabel is even more enthusiastic in her sight-seeing than she had been in England, but James is quick to point out that she is not the stereotypical tourist rushing from sight to sight without any understanding or appreciation: “she went about in a kind of repressed ecstasy of contemplation, seeing often in the things she looked at a great deal more than was there, and yet not seeing many of the items enumerated in ‘Murray’” (250). James is unclear as to whether or not

Isabel purposely missed sights from Murray’s list of what “ought to be seen,” but her

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tendency to see either too much or too little foreshadows her later marital problem, as

Isabel does not see nearly all there is to see between her husband and Mrs. Merle.

In fact, James is explicit in the correlation between Isabel’s enthusiasm as a tourist and the innocence and naïveté that leave her at a disadvantage. Seeing a “great deal more than was there” speaks to Isabel’s tendency to overestimate the value of sights as well as people:

She had not been one of the superior tourists who are ‘disappointed’ in St.

Peter’s and find it smaller than its fame…her conception of greatness

received an extension. After this it never lacked space to soar. She gazed

and wondered, like a child or a peasant, and paid her silent tribute to

visible grandeur. (257)

While Amy and Dorothea remain emotionally and psychologically confined, Isabel’s spatial perception is expanded beyond her imagination. The simplicity with which Isabel experiences Rome is the same attitude with which she approaches life, and in both cases she is left vulnerable and without a trustworthy guide because she overestimates the goodness in others. The visual metaphors here are abundant—Isabel’s gaze fails to apprehend; she is wide-eyed but blind to the situation. Even after the confrontation when

Isabel realizes not only the affair, but, much worse, that she has been used and manipulated by Mrs. Merle. Isabel “fell back, covering her face with her hands…Before she uncovered her face again that lady had left the room” (454). In other words, when

Isabel’s eyes are literally open, her figurative eyes are closed to the truth; once she understands the situation, she closes her physical eyes to shut out the ugliness of the situation.

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When James describes Isabel as “like a child or a peasant,” this simile is much more nuanced than a cursory reading suggests. If James had merely said “like a child,”

Isabel’s vulnerability would have been clear, but his inclusion of “or a peasant” reveals the extent to which he relies upon picturesque stereotypes in which peasants are child- like, vulnerable, and ignorant. Before Isabel realizes the sources of unhappiness in her marriage, she often seeks solace in picturesque sights:

She had long before this taken old Rome into her confidence, for in a

world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural

catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for

centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the

silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and

grew objective…Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her

haunting sense of continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the

less to the greater. She had become deeply, tenderly acquainted with

Rome; it interfused and moderated her. (454)

For Isabel, as with most tourists before her, the ruins of Rome signal the picturesque, which allows an aesthetic and objective distance from both the sights and her own unhappiness.

Isabel’s ability to find comfort and inspiration in Rome as her own life crumbles stands in stark contrast to Dorothea, who, rather than feeling “detached” or “objective,” feels herself “plunged in tumultuous preoccupation with her personal lot” (Eliot 193):

The weight of unintelligible Rome might lie easily on bright nymphs to

whom it formed a background for the brilliant picnic of Anglo-foreign

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society; but Dorothea had no such defence against deep impressions.

Rome and basilicas, palaces and colossi, set in the midst of a sordid

present, where all that was living and warm-blooded seemed sunk in the

deep degeneracy of a superstition divorced from reverence. (193)

Isabel may not be a “bright nymph” but she does, unlike Dorothea, find comfort in losing herself in the picturesque setting, in which Rome is a pleasing background and she is given an objective distance from her own unhappiness. James’s view of child-like peasants seems somewhat more kind when read against Dorothea’s Puritanical view of

Italians as degenerate, superstitious, and irreverent.

There are, of course, a great many differences between Isabel and her predecessors. First, The Portrait of a Lady does not have a conventional marriage plot as its primary goal; in fact “marriage plot” takes on an entirely different, nefarious meaning in this novel. Second, Isabel is not a passive heroine who is taken abroad by the will and desires of a father or husband; she is a female protagonist (I use this phrase intentionally to avoid the gendered helplessness of the “heroine.”) who makes her own decisions, or at least she thinks she does. At the beginning of the novel, Isabel travels because she can, and she can precisely because she does not have a father or husband. After being manipulated by her husband and his mistress, Isabel’s return to Rome at the end of the novel is somewhat of a reclamation of her autonomy, however unsatisfying it may be for the reader: Isabel knows the truth but willingly returns. The fact remains that her happiest moments are as a tourist, and her unhappiest moments occur when she is no longer a tourist, but becomes the lady of a house “which was mentioned in ‘Murray’ and visited by tourists” (319).

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To put it simply, Isabel marks a turning point in how tourists, particularly female tourists, are represented in novels, not as passive women or figures of satirical derision, but as intelligent and strong-willed women. Isabel is not, as Q.D. Leavis claims,50 just an inferior derivative of Amy Dorrit and Dorothea Brooke; instead, Isobel is the next evolutionary step, in both aesthetics and tourism, mirroring changing attitudes towards women, as well as growing acceptance that women (at least wealthy women) in the late nineteenth century could travel alone or with female companions. In a way, Isabel is the revelatory link between tourists in Dickens or Eliot and the vastly different tourists in the

Italian fiction of E. M. Forster.

Picturesque Tourism in Forster’s “The Story of Panic” and

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Whereas James uses Italy as a backdrop, Italians as occasional props, and tourism as a plot device, E. M. Forster’s Italian fiction is about tourism. In his short fiction “The

Story of Panic” and “The Eternal Moment,” the characters’ lives are often secondary to the story of tourism. In his novels A Room with a View, along with earlier drafts known as The Lucy Novels, and Where Angels Fear to Tread, “the tourist” is as much a central character as Lucy Honeychurch or Philip Herriton, and, as in Dickens, Eliot, or James, characters are indentified by their attitudes toward tourism. Forster also picks up from these earlier novelists a disdain for guidebooks and tourism that has been mediated through texts. As Buzard explains, “Forster could look back on a career marked by

50 In “A Note on Literary Indebtedness: Dickens, George Eliot, Henry James,” Q. D. Leavis describes The Portrait of a Lady, as compared to Middlemarch, as “insignificant and disappointing, betraying its derivativeness everywhere but showing no justification for imitating one of George Eliot's most striking creative achievements” (428). 131

considerable engagement with tourism, that complex set of institutions and cultural practices for which Baedeker and Murray had long been familiar symbols” (285), adding

“From the beginning of his career, Forster’s texts strain to comprehend more serious truths about tourism’s banal [and] easily satirizable cultural practices” (288). At the same time, Forster is also critical of what Buzard and others have called “anti-tourists” (162), those pretentious, class-conscious, and self-styled English travellers who saw themselves as inheritors of the eighteenth-century Grand Tour. Rather than Baedeker or Murray, the anti-tourists preferred John Ruskin’s guides, parroting his doctrines on Italy and art. The anti-tourist was also more familiar with traditional rules of the picturesque, which mass- tourists absorbed in fragments by cultural osmosis, without knowing the origins or precise meanings of the terms they used. Neither group is prepared to abandon the mediation of their preferred vade mecums, which symbolize the boundaries of societal propriety while abroad, but both groups continue to see Italy as a picturesque backdrop for spectatorship. In other words, by critiquing both groups equally, Forster’s fiction shows that his interest in aesthetics and textual mediation is central to his engagement with tourism.

“The Story of Panic,” which was Forster’s first publication, begins with a tourist picnic and an explicit debate about visual culture in the woody hills above the Italian town of Ravello on the Amalfi Coast. In his own introduction to The Collected Works of

E.M. Forster, he explains that the original germ of the story was planted on a visit to

Ravello in 1902, right after he had finished Cambridge: “I sat down in a valley, a few miles above the town, and suddenly the first chapter of The Story of a Panic rushed into my mind as if it had waited for me up there. I wrote it out as soon as I returned to the

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hotel” (v-vi, emphasis original). Forster’s experience of writing mirrors the rush of panic experienced in the story, and his own placement in the hills above Ravello make it difficult to separate Forster’s biography from his fiction.

Forster had by that time undoubtedly heard many arguments about how one should properly appreciate the Italian countryside, and it is fitting that his first work of fiction begins with tourists arguing about visual culture, when one young female tourists exclaims, “What a pretty picture it would make!” An amiable gentleman, Mr. Sandbach, enthusiastically agrees, “Yes...Many a famous European gallery would be proud to have a landscape a tithe as beautiful as this upon its walls” (6). Like so many tourists who bear the brunt of criticism, these two visual spectators may prefer natural landscapes to paintings, but they cannot escape the language of the picturesque. This is not entirely the tourists’ fault; landscape, vista, and panorama are all words that originate in visual culture to discuss landscape painting, making it impossible to speak of a natural landscape without the residue of eighteenth-century aesthetics.

Forster’s own “artistic traveller” appears as Leyland, an erudite snob, who argues with Mr. Sandbach:

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. (6)

Unlike the tourists who are taught by their guidebooks and popular opinion to discuss every scene in terms of painting, Leyland, for all his pedantry, understands Gilpin’s rules

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of the picturesque, which require roughness, varied tints, and a tripartite model of aesthetic distance, including the foreground, middle-distance, and background. Leyland stands in for a class of overly intellectual anti-tourists who, in the vein of Oscar Wilde, hold art in higher esteem than nature and cannot enjoy scenery unless it fits classic definitions.

While Leyland retains the connection between picturesque sight-seeing and its philosophical beginnings, Sandbach and his companions are less educated, and while

Gilpin’s influence is still there, their scopic practices have been altered by technology.

Sandbach defends himself with a healthy dose of passive aggression, saying, “I do not know anything about pictures…and I do not pretend to know: but I know what is beautiful when I see it, and I am thoroughly content with this” (6). Leyland, once again, explains, “Ah!...You all confuse the artistic view of Nature with the photographic” (7). I would argue, however, that Sandbach misspeaks: he does know at least something about pictures, as all tourists do, because tourism is structured around aesthetic principles borrowed from art criticism, and guidebooks are largely guides to the art of Italy.

The conversation then turns to the increasing commercialization and urbanization that is destroying the woodland areas around Ravello. The story’s unnamed narrator defends the local landowners for making a profit out of their landscape, while Leyland laments the loss of poetry, that “the Nereids have left the waters and the Oreads the mountains, and the woods no longer give shelter to Pan” (9). Mr. Sandbach, showing all the aesthetic and moral sense that usually brings castigation upon middle-class mass tourists, counters Leyland with apocryphal Christianity: “[M]ariners who were sailing near the coast at the time of the birth of Christ…three times heard a loud voice saying:

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‘The great God Pan is dead” (9). According to the narrator, who is cut of the same cloth as Sandbach, Leyland then “abandoned himself to that mock misery in which artistic people are so fond of indulging” (9). Thus, like Dickens sixty years before, Forster gives us in the opening pages of “The Story of Panic” a subtle and nuanced catalogue of specific tourist types, along with their respective class and aesthetic allegiances; yet, despite differences, each tourist, except the young boy Eustace, is suddenly gripped by the same unnamed and inexplicable terror that sends the party racing down the hill, as the narrator says, “afraid, not as a man, but as a beast” (12).

When the tourists, who had been overcome by primal, animalistic fear, regain their composure, they return to find Eustace, a boy of fourteen, with his hands

“convulsively entwined in the long grass,” a “peculiar smile” on his face, and “goat’s footmarks in the moist earth” surrounding his body. Every detail in this scene points to a sexual experience with Pan, which sets the boy on a trajectory that is outside of the normal confines of the tourist experience. The narrator foreshadows Eustace’s notorious fate by describing his expression: “I have often seen that peculiar smile since, both on the possessor’s face and on the photographs of him that are beginning to get into the illustrated papers” (14). Though Forster never reveals why Eustace’s picture is circulated in newspapers, these references towards changing technologies in visual and material culture appear as a specter of the rapidly evolving world, perhaps more threatening than

Pan himself. Having already differentiated between picturesque beauty and the photographic, the illustrated paper is a sign of what is to come—more photographs, less picturesque. Newspapers, with their proliferation of images, circulate evidence and information, rather than art or aesthetic appreciation. At the same time, however, Eustace

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remains as a personification of the danger of the picturesque if the demarcation between the person and the poetic is destroyed, if the observer is brought into close contact with a figure from the middle-distance.

After Eustace’s experience in the woods with Pan, he continues to evolve into an increasingly animalistic figure. When he sees Pan’s goat-like hoofmarks where he had lain, he “lay down and rolled on them, as a dog rolls in the dirt” (16), but he is also increasingly virile: “He stepped out manfully, for the first time in his life, holding his head up and taking deep drafts of air into his chest” (18). Even though his masculinity initially complies with English propriety, his maturation into manhood is a natural consequence of having gained sexual experience, which, in turn, leads to a greater intimacy with a young pensione waiter.

When Gennaro appears, his attire and corporeality are central, with his “arms and legs sticking out of a nice little English-speaking waiter’s dress suit, and a dirty fisherman’s cap on his head” (21). Buzard offers an interpretation of the unruly Italian body, which fails to meet the expectations of the tourist, just as it fails to fit into its respectable uniform:

A glimpse of Gennaro’s body provides, for Forster, the image of

ungovernable authenticity, the body of the true Italy, which cannot be

made to suit the demands of encroaching tourism…The representation of

foreign cultural authenticity by means of an irrepressible human body is a

characteristic Forsterian metonym: bodies assert themselves and their

materiality throughout Forster’s work, in opposition to the falsely spiritual

and romanticized experience that is tourism’s stock-in-trade. (295)

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Here, as elsewhere in The Beaten Track, Buzard reads any Italian body as a symbol of authenticity, a word that is overwrought with meaning in touristic studies, but I would like to reexamine the Italian body in terms of visual aesthetics.

Gennaro is supposed to be merely a rustic peasant to ornament the scene and add a bit of local color, while the tourist-as-spectators maintain a safe aesthetic distance.

Should the spectator come into contact with the Italian peasant, as does Eustace in “The

Story of Panic” or James in Italian Hours, the tourist risks being confronted with the reality of poverty, while destroying the tripartite structure upon which the picturesque, and by extension, the landscape itself, depends. This leads to a homoerotic relationship between young boys of different classes, destabilizing the sexual propriety of middle- class English tourists. In other words, reading Forster’s fiction for visual aesthetics does not negate readings based on class, race, gender, or sexuality; on the contrary, aesthetics allows us to visualize what Mary Louis Pratt calls “contact zones” in which “disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in highly asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination” (7). The aesthetics of tourism, particularly the rigid tripartite structure of the picturesque, provide a hermeneutical model for understanding these contact zones in terms of tourism, as well as illustrating the relationships between aesthetics and sexuality.

When Eustace “sprang up to meet [Gennaro], and leapt right up into his arms, and put his own arms around his neck” (22), he is transgressing against the codes of both class and the picturesque gaze, which necessitates objective distance. However, it is the transgression of sexual norms which most disturbs the narrator:

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I always make a point of behaving pleasantly to Italians, however little

they may deserve it; but this habit of promiscuous intimacy was perfectly

intolerable, and could only lead to familiarity and mortification for all.

Taking Miss Robinson [Eustace’s aunt and guardian] aside, I asked her

permission to speak seriously on the subject of intercourse with social

inferiors. (22)

The multiple definitions of “intercourse”51 enable Forster to hide the otherwise explicit homoeroticism under a demure mask of Edwardian respectability. Similarly, the name,

“The Story of Panic” plays upon several meanings of the term, relating simultaneously with the panic felt by the fleeing tourists, the Pan-theism of the Great God Pan, and underscored by our modern interpretations of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick calls the

“homosexual panic” (19), which sees specters of queer sexuality as always threatening the status quo.

For the narrator of the tale, this queer intimacy is most threatening, not because of

Eustace’s animalism, but because he’s growing increasingly Italian. Soon Gennaro, with

“his warm garlicky breath,” is calling him “Eustazio” (32) and helps him escape from the room where the English tourists have tried to lock him away. Confinement, for one who has “been in the woods and understood things” (35) means certain death, according to

Gennaro. But Eustace’s freedom is gained at Gennaro’s expense as the Italian boy slips from a low wall; Gennaro “swayed forward and fell upon his face on the path. He had not broken any limbs, and a leap like that would never have killed an Englishman, for the drop was not great. But those miserable Italians have no stamina. Something had gone

51 According to the OED, as early as 1803, Thomas Malthus refers to intercourse in a sexual sense, rather than a social context, in “An Essay on the Principle of Population.” By the early twentieth century, the term could refer to conversation or sexual relationships. 138

wrong inside him, and he was dead” (38). The narrator’s blatant xenophobia, coupled with his prudishness, has already eroded our trust in his reliability. Forster is clearly not the narrator, despite his own ‘panic’ experience near Ravello, but one cannot help but see a conflation of narrator and author when Italian life is sacrificed for the sake of liberating an English tourist. Breaking the rules of the picturesque, that is, of bringing the English spectator into intimate contact with the Italian spectacle, poses a threat, not only to the tourist, who could be overcome with irrepressible sexual and animalistic urges, but also to the Italian, whose way of life, and indeed life itself, is constantly threatened by the very presence of tourism.

Like “The Story of Panic,” Forster’s first novel, Where Angels Fear to Tread

(1905), is about relatively conventional tourists who are forced into a greater intimacy with an Italian peasant, thus shattering all previously held conventions and misconceptions about Italy. The protagonist, Philip Herriton, is somewhere between a tourist and an anti-tourist. He treasures his Baedeker, but speaks disparagingly of tourists, believing that he has already experienced the true Italy: “At twenty-two he went to

Italy…and there he absorbed into one aesthetic whole olive-trees, blue sky, frescoes, country inns, saints, peasants, mosaics, statues, and beggars” (Angels 70). Forster’s description is reminiscent of both Coleridge’s definition of the picturesque as “when the parts only are seen and distinguished, but the whole is felt” (324) and Jonathan Culler’s description that tourists are “agents of semiotics: all over the world they are engaged in reading cities, landscapes and cultures as sign systems” (155). Philip has read the various signs for what is authentically and essentially Italy, thus he has perceived an aesthetic, picturesque whole. At the same time, Philip not only relies on the information of

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Baedeker to construct these sign systems, he even has an emotional response to the banal details of the guidebook: “Philip could never read ‘The view from the Rocca (small gratuity) is finest at sunset’ without a catching at the heart” (29-30). Any knowledge or experience of Italy that Philip has had is mediated through his Baedeker and is, thus, superficial and suspect.

When Philip’s sister-in-law, Lilia, embarks on a trip to Italy after her husband’s death, Philip instructs, “[It] is only by going off the beaten track that you get to know the country. See the little towns…And don’t…go with that tourist idea that Italy’s only a museum of antiquities and art. Love and understand the Italians, for the people are more marvellous than the land” (19). Following his advice, Lilia and her travelling companion,

Caroline Abbott, visit Rome, Florence, and Naples, before settling in the small (fictional) town of Monteriano. Lilia writes to the Herritons, “[Monteriano] is not only so quaint, but one sees the Italians unspoiled in all their simplicity and charm here” (26); of course, in the tourists’ lexicon, “unspoilt” usually means abject poverty. While it is questionable that Philip had previously known any Italian well enough to “love and understand” an entire population, Lilia takes Philip’s instruction quite literally by marrying Gino Carella, who, like Forster’s other Italians, is always poorly dressed: “None of his clothes seemed to fit—too big in one place, too small in another...the shoulders falling forward till his coat wrinkled across the back and pulled away from his wrists”52 (62). Even Lilia’s first impression of Gino is based upon aesthetics she has learned from Philip; Caroline recounts, “Lilia went out for a walk alone, saw that Italian in a picturesque position on a

52 There are rare instances in which Forster describes English characters in ill-fitting clothing. Philip is described as “a tall, weakly-built young man, whose clothes had to be judiciously padded on the shoulders in order to make him pass muster” (70). Whereas Italians are usually described as too big for their clothing, Philip is too small for his. Clothes become a metaphor for others’ expectations. This small sartorial detail is yet another example of Gino and Philip’s paralleled lives. 140

wall, and fell in love. He was shabbily dressed, and she did not know he was the son of a dentist” (74). Having first been told that Gino was Italian nobility, Philip cannot reconcile the truth with his aesthetic ideal of Italy:

A dentist! A dentist at Monteriano! A dentist in fairyland! False teeth and

laughing-gas and the tilting chair at a place which knew the Etruscan

League, and the Pax Romana, and Alaric himself, and the Countess

Matilda, and the Middle Ages, all fighting and holiness, and the

Renaissance, all fighting and beauty! He thought of Lilia no longer. He

was anxious for himself: he feared that Romance might die. (37)

Expecting Italy to be immune to the mundane elements of everyday life, the incongruity of dentistry threatens Philip’s aesthetic ideals. Philip has done the very thing he warns

Lilia against—he has turned Italy into a museum. Philip’s image of Italy is just that—an image, a sign of the essential picturesque; it is a superficial aesthetic ideal which does not accommodate the modern or the commonplace.

When Philip travels to Italy to retrieve Lilia, he finds himself sitting down to dinner with Gino, carefully observing his changing expression as the Italian’s hunger is satisfied: “Philip had seen that face before in Italy a hundred times—seen it and loved it, for it was not merely beautiful, but had the charm which is the rightful heritage of all who are born on that soil. But he did not want to see it opposite him at dinner. It was not the face of a gentleman” (41). The picturesque is destroyed by proximity, threatening Philip’s entire social order.

Philip’s ideal of Italy as a composite of olive trees, frescoes, and rustic peasants is tainted, first, by Gino, and then by the revelation that Lilia has already married the

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Italian, and is thus beyond saving. Her subsequent death in childbirth ends any remaining illusion that Philip may have still harbored:

Italy, the land of beauty was ruined for him. She had no power to change

men and things who dwelt in her. She, too, could produce avarice,

brutality, stupidity—and what was worse, vulgarity. It was on her soil and

through her influence that a silly woman had married a cad…and now that

the sordid tragedy had come it filled him with pangs, not of sympathy, but

of final disillusion. (71)

Philip denies his own part in the tragedy, and his behavior further underscores the inherent selfishness of the picturesque gaze. The ideal of rustic beauty and charming squalor gives no thought to the living conditions of poor Italians, and when the image is destroyed, first by the sudden consciousness of dentistry and then by the thought of Gino,

Philip thinks only of himself, rather than showing sympathy for Lilia, Gino, or the child.

Philip’s multiple alterations during the course of the novel refute his claim that

Italy “has no power to change men” (71). After becoming an aesthete following his earliest tour of Italy and then disillusioned by his first meeting with Gino, Philip is again transformed when he returns to Italy to retrieve Lilia’s child. Once in Florence, he is again under Italy’s spell: “For there was enchantment…He could see it in the terrific blue sky beneath which they travelled, in the whitened plain which gripped life harder than a frost, in the exhausted reaches of the Arno, in the ruins of brown castles which stood quivering upon the hills” (91). This is Philip’s return to the picturesque—to an arrangement of castles, ruins, and hills in the distance. Forster writes, “Romance had returned to Italy; there were no cads in her; she was beautiful, courteous, loveable, as of

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old” (103). It is as if merely leaving the social constrictions of Sawston and traveling to

Italy has once again freed Philip’s mind from social and aesthetic constrictions.

Caroline Abbott returns to Italy with Philip, and her own Italian transformation mirrors his. Her bold and passionate behavior in Monteriano varies significantly from the refined personality she portrays in Sawston. When their attention turns away from rescuing Lilia’s child to the possibility of attending an opera, Philip teases Carline by reminding her of their purpose; he watches as “All the pleasure and light went out of her face, and she became again Miss Abbott of Sawston—good, oh, most undoubtedly good, but most appallingly dull. Dull and remorseful” (104). While Caroline is rejuvenated by tourist pastimes, her foil in Italy is Philip’s sister, Harriet Herriton, who comes to succeed where Philip and Caroline have failed. She is “acrid, indissoluble, large; the same in Italy as in England—changing her disposition never, and her atmosphere under protest” (105).

Harriet represents the worst type of English traveler—tourist or anti-tourist—who refuses to abandon the strictures of England and be transformed by going abroad.

If Little Dorrit and Middlemarch depict an Italy where change occurs gradually and subtly, Forster’s novels seem to require a catalyst of direct—often violent— interaction with Italians. In Where Angels Fear to Tread, the final stage of transformation for both Philip and Caroline occurs when the child dies in a carriage accident as Harriet attempts to kidnap him. When Gino learns that his child is dead, he responds with rage, brutally and sadistically beating Philip. Philip’s safe distance from the Italian is removed, first by physical violence, then by compassion and brotherhood when Caroline intervenes to stop the fight. Caroline becomes a maternal “goddess” (151), pressing Gino to her breast, and instructs the men to share the baby’s milk. Later, as Caroline prepares to leave

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Italy, she resolves to never return, saying, “Because I understand the place. There is no need” (154). Philip, sounding more like George Emerson from A Room with a View, warns her, “You can’t go back to the old life if you wanted to. Too much has happened”

(156). Caroline, we learn, has fallen in love with Gino, who has already remarried for money. As Caroline confesses her feelings she accuses Philip of not understanding:

“[Y]ou’re without passion; you look on life as a spectacle; you don’t enter it; you only find it funny or beautiful” (158). The old Philip might have mocked her, especially since there is some indication that he has fallen in love with her, but instead he feels compassion, “manag[ing] to think not of himself but of her” (158).

The most overt romance of the novel, however, is the relationship between Philip and Gino who are “bound by ties of almost alarming intimacy” (153). Philip denounces

Sawston altogether and plans to reunite with Gino to “paint Siena red for a day or two with some of the new wife’s money” (153). The subtle homoeroticism of the novel speaks to the relaxed sexual and moral codes enjoyed by tourists in Italy, a historical reality that is never mentioned by Dickens or Eliot. The novel’s break from heterosexual romance coincides with Philip’s break from normative modes of seeing. When the novel closes, Philip is no longer a guidebook-carrying tourist, but finally sees Italians as something more than merely beautiful ornaments in his spectacle.

Moving Beyond the Surface: Tourists and Texts in A Room with a View

Like Philip Herriton, A Room with a View’s Lucy Honeychurch is a typical tourist, that is, a young, naïve devotée of Baedeker. Using the Baedeker’s Northern Italy, Lucy

“committed to memory the most important dates in Florentine history. For she was

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determined to enjoy herself on the morrow” (11). Like many inexperienced tourists, Lucy believes that information is the prerequisite for enjoyment. It is only when Miss Lavish, an ardent anti-tourist, reprimands her and confiscates her guidebook that Lucy has her first glimpse of what she believes is the “true Italy” of which Miss Lavish speaks:

For one ravishing moment Italy appeared. She stood in the Square of the

Annunziata and saw in the living terra-cotta those divine babies whom no

cheap reproduction can ever stale. There they stood, with their shining

limbs bursting from the garments of charity, and their strong white arms

extended against circlets of heaven. Lucy thought she had never seen

anything more beautiful. (17)

Like Gennaro and Gino, the “living terra cotta” does not fit into the restrictive clothing meant for a stranger’s body, nor do they figure into stereotypical tourist experiences. If we follow Buzard’s reading, they are Forsterian symbols of authenticity, but the Italy that

Lucy encounters is not the same “true Italy” of Miss Lavish’s exhortation. Miss Lavish drags Lucy away, seemingly oblivious to the scene of life right in front of her. For Lucy, this is a revelatory experience because it is her first direct and unmediated contact with

Italy and, more importantly, with Italians, and she finds the “living terra-cotta” of the children superior to the “cheap reproductions” found in art, reversing the standard aesthetic hierarchy in which art is the ideal towards which nature must strive.

When abandoned “In Santa Croce with No Baedeker,” as Forster’s chapter is famously titled, and confronted with art and architecture, Lucy feels vulnerable because tourist culture mistakes information for understanding, and in order to enjoy or appreciate a sight, one must first glean all of the information from the guidebook:

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[Lucy] walked about disdainfully, unwilling to be enthusiastic over

monuments of uncertain authorship or date. There was no one even to tell

her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts,

was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised

by Ruskin. (18-19)

The sepulchral slabs, however, are not mentioned in the guidebook. This scene is one of several in A Room with a View that show traces of Forster’s earlier drafts in which, instead of reading Baedeker, Lucy reads Ruskin.53 Without either text, Forster writes,

“Then the pernicious charm of Italy worked on her, and instead of acquiring information, she began to be happy” (19). It is not because Lucy has decided to rely on her judgment of beauty; instead, she is distracted from the frescoes and sepulchers and begins to watch the scenes of people around her—tourists with their noses “as red as their Baedekers”

(19) and, more significantly, Italian children at play. Without her guidebook, Lucy’s experience is more personal and spontaneous. When one of the children falls, she rushes forward, along with Mr. Emerson, to comfort the boy. When they have “picked him up, dusted him, [and] rubbed his bruises” (19) Lucy comes into physical contact with the

Italian people—first the child, then the woman who claims him—for the first time. This scene, although subtle, is an intermediate moment in the novel, standing between Lucy’s first encounter with the “terra-cotta” babies, which is entirely visual, and the later scene of physical violence in the square.

In Forster’s early manuscripts, known collectively as The Lucy Novels,54 Lucy

(originally Miss Protheroe) is accompanied by Mr. Arthur, a prototype of George

53 Baedeker does frequently quote or reference Ruskin, but not in this instance. 54 Henceforth, I will cite The Lucy Novels as LV and A Room with a View as RV. 146

Emerson, when a similar event occurs. In this scene, “Those tourists who had noticed the episode either tittered or else commented severely on the national degradation that could permit such irreverence in a church. But the majority were reading out aloud from their guidebooks, and heard nothing” (25). This time Lucy does not interfere with the child, but remarks that watching children play “is the kind of thing I waste my time over” (LN

26). The earlier Lucy seems more appreciative of the life found outside of guidebooks, while the sting of Forster’s satire is directed at the hypocritical tourists reading guidebooks, the worst kind of irreverence. Forster’s narrative is much more subtle in A

Room with a View, in which Lucy must be gradually weaned from the text before she can undergo a transformation in Italy.

In The Lucy Novels, unlike the other “red nosed people carrying red books in their hands” (a description only slightly altered in A Room with a View), Lucy visits Santa

Croce armed with Mornings in Florence for “her first experience of that invaluable and exasperating book” (LN 22):

[Lucy] began by finding a sepulchral slab, the book informing her that if

she did not like it she was to leave Florence at once. She liked it very

much, till a bowed sacristan who had observed her heretical conduct stole

up to her and told her in broken English that she was looking at the wrong

slab. He led her to the right one which was trimmed with a wreath of

attentive tourists, and she did not like it so well. (22)55

55 In Mornings in Florence, Ruskin compares Galileo’s tomb with a later, overly-ornate, fifteenth-century tomb that lies nearby: “But had it been a modern trick-sculpture [referring to the fifteenth-century tomb], the moment you came to the tomb you would have said ‘Dear me! How wonderfully that carpet is done,--it doesn’t look like stone in the least—one longs to take it up and beat it, to get the dust off.’ Now whenever you feel inclined to speak so of a sculptured drapery, be assured, without more ado, the sculpture is base, and bad. You will merely waste your time and corrupt your taste by looking at it. Nothing is so easy as to imitate drapery in marble…But that is not sculpture. That is mechanical manufacture” (22). Later, Ruskin 147

By accident, she finds her own tastes at odds with Mornings in Florence, and, like James in Italian Hours, she grows weary of Ruskin who:

got wilder and wilder. He fulminated against butcher’s [sic] shops, cab

stands, microscopic evenings for children & circulating libraries; abused

Mr Spurgeon56, the serene Mr Murray, the rapturous Crowe and the

cautious Cavalcaselle57; confessed with sorrow that he was the only person

who could tell anyone anything about art, and bade her go buy buns or

worse if she did not believe him. (22)

Like James before her, Lucy rejects Mornings in Florence: “Shutting up her book she sat down, being well content to postpone for a little the hour of acquiring knowledge” (22).

As in A Room with a View, without a textual mediator, Lucy is now free to observe the scenes around her and listen to tourists who are too preoccupied with the text to enjoy the scene. One young couple struggles to understand Ruskin, saying, “The drapery on this tomb looks as if you could pick it up, and therefore it must be bad. I wonder why”58 (23, notation original), while most “visitors were better trained, and abused without restraint the vanity, the vulgarity, the meaness [sic], the heartlessness of the tomb” (23, notation original). The well-travelled, “better trained” tourist never

adds, “And if you really and honestly like the low-lying stones [meaning Galileo’s tomb], and see more beauty in them, you have also the power of enjoying Giotto, into whose chapel we will return to-morrow” (28). 56 Charles Haddon Spurgeon, an influential Baptist minister: “I have read the picture to you as, if Mr. Spurgeon knew anything about art, Mr. Spurgeon would read it,--that is to say, from the plain, common sense, Protestant side. If you are content with that view of it, you may leave the chapel, and as far as any study of history is concerned, Florence also; for you can never known anything either about Giotto, or her” (Mornings in Florence 63). 57 Joseph Archer Crowe and Giovanni Battista Cavalcaselle, authors of A New History of Painting In Italy (1864-1871). 58 The editorial notations are provided by Oliver Stallybrass, who collected and edited the early drafts and manuscripts of the novel. Stallybrass’s notational symbols indicate: “(a) words deleted, then reinserted, by Forster; or (b) words between oboli substituted by Forster for words within angle brackets” (LN xi). 148

questions Ruskin’s authority, drawing the same degree of consternation usually reserved for the less educated tourists of Murray or Baedeker.

In the published novel, Baedeker is the text read by mass-tourists, while Ruskin is aligned with the English anti-tourist “colony” (49) in Florence. Mr. Eager, an English clergyman, tells Lucy, “[W]e residents sometimes pity you poor tourists not a little— handed about like a parcel of goods from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome… quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get ‘done’ or

‘through’ and go on somewhere else” (59). This remark echoes, not only Ruskin’s disdain for tourist hurry, but also his descriptions of modern travel as “merely being

‘sent’ to a place, and very little different from becoming a parcel” (Modern Painters Vol.

3, 311). Ultimately, those who adopt and replicate the invectives of Ruskin are not only satirized, like Baedeker’s followers, but they are also undermined as frauds. Lucy

“doubted that Mr. Eager was as full of spirituality and culture as she had been led to suppose” (RV 51). Just as Ruskin, by attacking Murray, cannot escape the influence of guidebooks, the anti-tourists, in mimicking Ruskin, cannot escape the flaws they see in tourists—that they have no real connection with or understanding of a place, and no original thought.

For Forster, tourists are rarely liberated from the guidance of their texts or the restraints of English propriety. They show no authenticity or originality in their mode of travel, their behaviour, or their response to sights. In The Lucy Novels, Lucy does not always agree with accepted opinion, but until she abandons Ruskin, she does not argue against it either. Aware that she is considered “original” and fearing that “her originality was not as orthodox as it should be” (18), Lucy mimics the typical touristic responses of

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her traveling companions: “[Lucy] joined in the praise of Milan cathedral, which she had not liked, and agreed with Miss Bartlett that it was ‘like lace work,’ and wondered with

Miss Kate Alan at the strange coincidence that Miss Alan had once said that it was like lace work too”59 (18). Lucy is exasperated by her companions’ uniformity of opinion, wondering why she left England only to encounter the same people, behaviors, and habits in Italy. Forster writes, “Lucy could have cried. It was for this that she had given up her home, made [some versions read ‘had’] endless railway journeys and four customs examinations—that she might sit with a party of English ladies who seemed even duller than ladies in England” (LN 18, notation mine). Lucy’s reaction to Florence’s English colony shows her desire to abandon the propriety of Windy Corner, and she is surprised to find that other English women could be so little altered by having lived in Italy. Unlike the Lucy of A Room with a View, who only shows her passion through music, her predecessor in The Lucy Novels demonstrates an earlier awakening and desire for breaking with the conformity and propriety of English tourists.

Forster’s English community is comprised of both guidebook tourists and the colony of permanent residents who boast of an intimate knowledge, yet fail to interact with locals or to be changed by living abroad. As in other colonial projects, the English have forced their cultural practices upon the local population, and, in a scene remarkably similar to Dickens’s description of tourists in Little Dorrit, Forster writes of a “curious tourist state…with special laws & customs, special food, special hours for meals, special clothes, and special privileges. It is true that it pays special prices for all it has, but it is a parasite that would hardly be tolerated in any other land” (LN 21). Rather than being changed by travel, the “parasitic” nature of tourism has imprinted upon Italy all of the

59 Ruskin often describes Gothic stones as “lace work” in both Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. 150

normal strictures and structures of English society, but with additional requirements for tourists.

Anti-tourists have their own set of practices and rules that govern their behavior, but instead of traveling around Italy, members of the “residential colony” imprison themselves in “perfect seclusion” behind high walls and thick hedges that shelter their own society from tourists. Mr. Eager, a devout anti-tourist:

knew the people who never walked about with Baedekers…who took

drives the pension tourists had never heard of, and saw by private

influence galleries which were closed to them…thus attaining to that

intimate knowledge, or rather perception, of Florence which is denied to

all who carry in their pockets the coupons of Cook. (49)

Forster draws attention to the subtle difference in connotation between “knowledge,” which suggests an attainable truth about Italy, and “perception,” which is simply a subjective mode of seeing, one that is often superficial and always culturally constructed.

An authentic “knowledge” of Italy would require an intimate engagement with the culture from which anti-tourists, just as much as guidebook tourists, are isolated.

Forster’s anti-tourists are as guilty of cultural commodification as guidebook tourists, viewing Italy as both an object to be possessed and as a series of signs to be interpreted as picturesque. In The Lucy Novels, Forster writes of Miss Lavish, “After every townlet she said ‘There you have Italy, Italy unspoiled” (16). Miss Lavish says of

Prato, “I never saw anything so sweetly squalid…between the squalor of London and the squalor of Prato there is a great gulf fixed” (LN 16). Completely void of ethical considerations, Miss Lavish sees the immense poverty and reads it as a sign of the

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picturesque, explicitly denying that the pleasure of her gaze originates from the same conditions as the squalor of London. The essential difference between the cities is the absence of industrialism and pollution in Italy. The aesthetic potential of Italian poverty benefits from the warm sun, clean air, and expansive views. Miss Lavish has little care for the Italian people, and despite being part of the English colony and claiming a great knowledge of Italy, Forster tells us, “Miss Lavish can’t learn language, ‘relying mostly on gestures’” (LN 10).

Miss Lavish, it must be remembered, is a producer of texts in her own right, and her books portray both her anti-touristic opinions and her romanticized image of picturesque Italians. In A Room with a View, she intends for her novel to “be unmerciful to the British tourist…It is the neglected Italians who attract me, and whose lives I am going to paint so far as I can” (47). Unsurprisingly, Under the Loggia is not a portrayal of Italian life at all, but a badly disguised description of George and Lucy’s kiss in the violet field. Forster does not give much more information other than that the novel is badly written. In The Lucy Novels, Forster provides a more enlightening summary via

Lucy’s evaluation of the novel:

The general idea was hopeful artistically: the misfortunes of the virtuous

Italian girl [above: peasants] were to be caused \indirectly/ by the stupidity

and worthlessness of the English tourists.60 Italian peasants, charming as

they are and however virtuous, do not ‘lose all sense of \space/

and being’ in the contemplation of Michel [sic] Angelo’s Dawn, especially

on a week day when there is a lira entrance fee. Nor would the heroine,

60 This plot summary also describes Forster’s own short story “The Eternal Moment,” which is discussed at the end of this chapter. 152

compelled by reduced circumstances to take in washing, have spare cash

for a Saturday to Monday ticket to San Gemignano [sic], nor would she on

her arrival there immediately ascend the cathedral tower alone and

meditate on the evils of plutocracy. (LN 95, notations original)

The young heroine’s actions are better suited to a holiday tourist or a professed anti- tourist than to an Italian peasant. The inaccuracies of Miss Lavish’s clearly sensationalist novel are indicative of the faults in her perception of people whom she claims to know and sympathize with, but only imagines to embody the nobility and romance of the picturesque.

When Forster does allow his characters close contact with Italians, it is almost always through moments of violence which initiate the recovery, redemption, or escape of the English tourist. In A Room with a View, Lucy is exploring Florence alone when she inadvertently happens upon two Italian men arguing over cinque lire lost in a bet. Forster explains that one of the men is “hit lightly upon the chest” (40). Suddenly, like Gennaro in “The Story of Panic,” when “Something had gone wrong inside him, and he was dead”

(“Panic” 38), the dying man “bent towards Lucy with a look of interest, as if he had an important message for her. He opened his lips to deliver it, and a stream of red came out between them and trickled down his unshaven chin” (RV 40). Like the violence and milk that bind Gino and Philip, Lucy is bound to the dead Italian by the blood that covers her tourist photographs. Forster writes, “[T]he thought occurred to her, ‘Oh, what have I done?’—the thought that she, as well as the dying man, had crossed some spiritual boundary” (RV 42). Even though this is an accidental death and Lucy is in no way complicit, she still feels guilty by proximity and because “She had complained of

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dullness, and lo! One man was stabbed, and another held her in his arms” (RV 40). Lucy tries to maintain decorum and civility, but it is her intimacy with George, even more so than the death of the Italian, that is significant.

From the moment the man “frowned [and] bent towards Lucy with a look of interest” to the moment “A crowd rose out of the dusk [and] hid this extraordinary man from her, and bore him away to the fountain” takes only a few short sentences. The man appears and disappears, and everything in between—the altercation, the blood trickling down his chin, the crowd—is presented as spectacle. Linking this man to Gennaro,

Buzard describes this as Forster’s:

efficiently employing and briskly disposing of the body…Just at the

moment when the exigencies of the narrative take over—when an Italian

body is required to fall at the feet of the hero and heroine—Forster

transforms his own symbol of authenticity, the Italian male body, into an

instrument entirely subsumed in its function within an English plot. (300)

In this way, the Italian’s entire purpose in life and in death is to bring Lucy and George together. Like Gennaro or Gino’s infant son, the Italian body is just a device in Forster’s plot of tourist liberation, and his life, like theirs, is used up as soon as that purpose is served.61 But this is also a cautionary tale, for both tourists and Italians, to maintain an aesthetic distance.

When Lucy is brought back into George’s arms, it is again because of an Italian peasant. When the party of English tourists goes for a drive in the campagna and have a picnic, not so unlike the one from “The Story of Panic,” the men and women separate for

61 It should be noted, however, that Forster often uses death to tie up loose ends, regardless of nationality. Leonard Bast in Howards End succumbs to “the last stages of heart-disease” (278), previously undetected, when a bookcase turns over and “books fell over him in a shower” (279). 154

walks. When Lucy decides to find Mr. Beebe, she struggles for an Italian word for

“clergyman” and asks the driver “Dove buoni uomini?”62 Lucy believes she has made herself understood, as the “the miscreant, a bony young man scorched black by the sun”

(100) leads her towards the “good man.” The misunderstanding is soon apparent, however, when Lucy reaches the hill where George is waiting:

From her feet the ground sloped sharply into view, and violets ran down in

rivulets and streams and cataracts, irrigating the hillside with blue,

eddying round the tree stems collecting into pools and hollows, covering

the grass with spots of azure foam. But never again were they in such

profusion; this terrace was the well-head, the primal source whence beauty

gushed out to water the earth. (102)

Instead of the blood which stains the photographs and pavements of the piazza, this scene is filled with even more water imagery than earlier descriptions of the Arno. The strongly sexualized language solidifies the tension that follows the characters throughout the novel, and it should be noted that the romance of the scene is entirely dependent upon the picturesque landscape.

Unlike the view from Ravello, the hillside outside Florence has all the variation of lines and richness of color that Gilpin requires, but there are also hints of Impressionism or even Post-Impressionism. The scene is marked by the language and philosophies of visual culture associated with Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf, and other members of the

Bloomsbury Group, to which, as Richard Shone explains, Forster was only “a tangential figure…[Forster] clings outwardly at least, to a late-Victorian sense of propriety whose

62 I would like to thank my colleague Mark De Cicco for informing me that “buoni” is often used in Italian slang to signify “sexy,” which adds another layer of meaning to Lucy’s blunder and the Italian driver’s (mis)understanding. 155

overturning provides much of the meat and most of the comedy of his first novels, such as A Room with a View” (114). Similarly, Forster clings to traditional aesthetics, but his language provides an elision between the picturesque and Modernism. While at the same time, Forster is deconstructing the picturesque, showing it as out-of-date and ethically flawed.

First, we see the fallacies of the picturesque through Miss Lavish’s laughable aesthetic appreciation of squalor, but more clearly, we see Forster’s deconstructive efforts in the two scenes—that is, in the piazza and on the hillside—that are most frequently associated with sexual awakenings. Both scenes are facilitated through close contact, and at least attempted communication with Italians. When the ornamental figure in the middle distance is brought into the foreground, we learn something of their lives, their loves, their losses, and even their deaths. The inevitable consequence is a sexual threat, initiating a greater intimacy and impropriety between the tourist and the native, as well as between George and Lucy.

The picturesque stands in for Victorian propriety. The distance between the observer and the object, the tourist and the Italian, is safe and conventional; this is the mode of viewing that is always propagated in novels such as Little Dorrit and

Middlemarch, in which the young woman’s tourist experience enables the traditional heterosexual marriage plot. Forster presents a break from conventional scopic experiences. Forster’s Italian fiction, especially A Room with a View, and Lucy

Honeychurch in particular, defies the tourist/anti-tourist binary, placing her in the indefinable space between boundaries, a place we can identify as Forster’s ideal; while at

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the same time, the tourist and the Italians pose a mutual threat to their respective status quos.

The Destructive Force of Text and Tourism in Forster’s “The Eternal Moment”

One of Forster’s most explicit critiques of tourism and its negative effects on local life is found in the short story “The Eternal Moment,” which takes its name from the fictional novel written by the story’s central character, Miss Raby. The fact that she is a

“lady novelist” draws immediate comparisons to Miss Lavish, but it is difficult to pinpoint where the similarities end because so little information is given about the novel itself. Instead, we see only the novel’s destructive effects on the town. Sounding remarkably similar to Wilde’s preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray, Forster describes the critical reception of the novel, “By a strange fate, the book made a great sensation, especially in unimaginative circles. Idle people interpreted it to mean that there was no harm in wasting time, vulgar people that there was no harm in being fickle, pious people interpreted it as an attack on morality” (275). By Wilde’s definition, “Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the work is new, complex, and vital” (xxiii).

While it is impossible say if Wilde’s axiom holds true in Miss Raby’s case, Forster’s text, as much as Wilde’s, is about the degenerative relationship between life and art.

Miss Raby’s novel takes place in the fictional Italian town of Vorta, which, like

Monteriano, is said to have been unspoiled by tourists during Miss Raby’s first visit.

However, Forster writes, “Miss Raby’s novel, ‘The Eternal Moment,’ which had made her reputation, had also made the reputation of Vorta” (263), and soon tourists

“penetrated to Vorta, where the scene of the book was laid” (275). Though Forster’s

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sexualized language is impossible to ignore, the first visitors he describes seem more like conventional travellers than the mass-tourists usually associated with violation: “Lady

Anstey exhibited water-colour drawings; Mrs Heriot, who photographed, wrote an article in The Strand; while The Nineteenth Century published a long description of the place by the Marquis of Bamburgh, entitled “The Modern Peasant, and his Relations with Roman

Catholicism” (275). Forster subtly outlines the pattern of tourism that begins with the production of a text which praises the “unspoilt” people and picturesque scenery. The text then draws the attention of upper-class artists and intellectuals intent on discovering whatever has been thus far undiscovered. These secondary texts then draw the attention of mass tourists: “Thanks to these efforts, Vorta became a rising place, and people who liked being off the beaten track went there, and pointed out the way to others” (275).

Miss Raby feels guilty for setting this change in motion and has avoided returning to the town she once loved, lest she should find it entirely changed. When she finally does return, twenty years have passed, and her worst fears are realized:

Her arrival was saddening. It displeased her to see the great hotels in a

great circle, standing away from the village where all life should have

centred. The illuminated titles, branded on the tranquil evening slopes, still

danced in her eyes. And the monstrous Hôtel des Alpes haunted her like a

nightmare. In her dreams, she recalled the portico, the ostentatious lounge,

the polished walnut bureau, the vast track for the bedroom keys…the

uniforms of the officials, and the smell of smart people—which is to some

nostrils quite as depressing as the smell of poor ones. (276)

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What Miss Raby detests most is that the signifiers of “authentic” Italy have been replaced by signs, quite literally, of artificiality and consumerism. Instead of quaint family-owned inns, there are international conglomerates designed to attract British tourists and given names such as “Hôtel de Londres” and “Pension Old-England.”63 These modern hotels have been built on high ground overlooking the town, providing the distance and perspective of the picturesque, but kept at a safe distance from the life and beauty of the city which the tourists presumably sought.

At the heart of “The Eternal Moment,” as well as Miss Raby’s novel of the same name, is her youthful romance twenty years before with Feo, a young Italian porter, “Not even a certificated guide. A male person who was hired to carry the luggage, which he dropped” (259). When the young man confesses his love, Miss Raby “thanked him not to insult [her]” (260), the same language used first by Charlotte, then by Lucy, to describe

George’s stolen kisses. Miss Raby attempts to run away from the scene only to twist her ankle, leading her straight into Feo’s arms: “He had to carry me half a mile” (260). Miss

Raby spends the next twenty years, and most of the story, wondering what would have happened if she had accepted his offer to run away. When she finds Feo again, his transformation is even more dramatic than Vorta’s. The incompetent porter is now concierge of one of the finest international hotels; he is efficient, multilingual, and successful. Objectively speaking, Feo’s transformation would be commendable, but in

Miss Raby’s opinion, he has only grown vulgar and fat:

63 The 1906 edition of Baedeker’s Northern Italy recommends Hôt. Grande Bretagne in Florence and the Hôt.Grande Byron in Ravenna. Perhaps the most notable example is the Hôtel d’Angleterre, established in Copenhagen in 1755 and still one of the most luxurious hotels in the world. The unrelated Hôtel d’Angleterre in Paris takes its name from the building’s former service as the British Embassy. Its name then attracted English-speaking artists, writers, and tourists, including Ernest Hemingway who lived at the hotel for over a month from December 1921 to January 1922. 159

It was absurd to blame Feo for his worldliness—for his essential vulgarity.

He had not made himself. It was even absurd to regret his transformation

from an athlete: his greasy stoutness, his big black kiss-curl, his waxed

moustache, his chin which was dividing and propagating itself like some

primitive form of life. (294)

Despite Feo’s personal success, Forster seems most concerned with the physical transformation, but even Feo’s increased age and weight are not seen as the natural course of time, but the damaging effects of the novel. Furthermore, all of Feo’s financial success is negated: “He had not made himself…In England, nearly twenty years before, she had altered his figure as well as his character. He was one of the products of ‘The

Eternal Moment’” (294). Forster completely removes Feo’s agency, while the destructive force of tourism is written across the Italian body.

Forster’s critique of tourism is problematic because he also relies on aestheticized poverty. His narrative, as much as Miss Raby’s, mourns the loss of the picturesque without considering the improved quality of life in Vorta. While making polite conversation and pretending not to recognize Miss Raby, Feo says “When I was a lad,

Vorta was a poor little place,” and Miss Raby responds, “But a pleasant place?” (295), and with that short exchange poverty is swept under the rug of visual pleasure.

Throughout most of the story, Forster’s sympathies and Miss Raby’s seem inextricable: even their titles are the same. Towards the end, however, Miss Raby becomes a figure of pathetic desperation, and like Philip Herriton and Caroline Abbott, demands an Italian’s child as the ultimate souvenir. While Philip and Caroline try to reclaim a part of the child that is still English, the part that is still Lilia’s, Miss Raby

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seeks some sort of utopian future, wherein Feo’s son would come to understand the wealthy English, rather than despise them as most Italians do. She believes that the child would then offer a means of understanding between the English tourist and the Italians.

She demands of Feo, “That will be my pardon…if out of the place where I have done so much evil I bring some good. I am tired of memories, though they have been very beautiful. Now, Feo, I want you to give me something else: a living boy” (304). While she claims to seek penance and enact kindness from purely altruistic motives, what she truly craves is to be the mother of Feo’s child, and he nearly consents, wondering how much money he could ask for his son, before stating that the child’s mother would never permit the transaction.

To ease the tension, Feo makes small talk about Vorta’s newly constructed tower, the looming symbol of all the change and destruction that The Eternal Moment has wreaked upon the town. The tower is one of the first sights Miss Raby sees when returns to the village, and, for a brief moment, it offers some hope that Vorta has changed for the better:

They were again informed that this was Vorta, and that that was the new

campanile—like the campanile of Venice, only finer—and that the sound

was the sound of the campanile’s new bell…Miss Raby rejoiced that the

village had made such use of its prosperity…The architect had indeed

gone south for his inspiration, and the tower which stood among the

mountains was akin to the tower which had once stood beside the lagoons.

But the birthplace of the bell it was impossible to determine, for there is

no nationality in sound. (267)

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We soon learn, however, that while sound might not have a nationality, the local priests’ morning bells have been silenced by complaining tourists, who did not like being awakened at six o’clock every morning. Furthermore, the campanile is simply another alteration which seemed required by the tourists, not an authentic symbol of Vorta, but a replica of St. Mark’s Campanile, which had crumbled to the ground in July of 1902, prior to Forster’s writing.64 Miss Raby’s hope for Vorta is short lived, and soon she laments because “The whole population was employed, even down to the little girls, who worried the guests to buy picture postcards and edelweiss. Vorta had taken to the tourist trade”

(284). As elsewhere, Miss Raby does not see the financial benefits of tourism as an improvement to the villagers’ quality of life because it has destroyed the old, more picturesque ways of life:

Obscure and happy, [Vorta’s] splendid energies had found employment in

wrestling a livelihood out of the earth, whence had come a certain dignity,

and kindliness, and love for other men…The family affection, the

affection for the commune, the sane pastoral virtues—all had perished

while the campanile which was to embody them was being built. (284)

All of these ill effects of tourism can be traced back to The Eternal Moment, but it must not be forgotten that the novel was a result of Miss Raby’s brief romance with Feo. As in

Forster’s other works, the story really begins at the moment of contact between the tourist and the Italian. The most heartbreaking truth for Miss Raby to face turns out not to be the damaging effects of tourism, but that Feo pretends to not remember the mountain-side

64 The tower currently standing in St. Mark’s Square was completed in 1912 and, like the fictional campanile of Vorta, is itself merely a replica. Vorta’s tower is one step removed, another layer of cultural simulacra constructed for the sake of tourism.

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proposal she has idealized for two decades. Feo reduces their entire romance to a conventional tourist plot: she was just another tourist, he merely a porter. Even her desire to adopt his child, whatever her motives, is just a potential financial transaction to Feo; his child is yet another commodity on the tourist market.

Their conversation is interrupted when:

From the darkening valley there rose up the first strong singing note of the

campanile, and she turned from the men towards it with a motion of love.

But that day was not to close without the frustration of every hope. The

sound inspired Feo to make conversation and, as the mountains

reverberated, he said: ‘Is it not unfortunate, sir? A gentleman went to see

our fine new tower this morning and he believes that the land is slipping

from underneath, and that it will fall. Of course it will not harm us up here.

(307)

Miss Raby does not read the campanile as a sign of the inauthentic; to her it is a symbol of “every hope” she still has that her book has brought some good to Vorta after all. Like the Venetian tower from which it is copied, the ground is sinking beneath its weight.

Feo’s consolation that “it will not harm us up here” suggests that the fall will harm the village below, wiping away what is left of the town square “where all life should have centered.” The story ends, as Forster’s fiction typically does, with a nihilistic tone that implies both the meaninglessness of travel and tourism and the destructive effects on

Italians who lose their native culture, or worse, their lives.

In the ever expanding body of scholarship, there has been attention paid to the function of tourism in fiction. Fictional tourists are not merely objects of ridicule or

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figures for satire, as Buzard and others have claimed; instead, a closer, more complex reading reveals tourism a trope through which issues of class, nationalism, textual mediation, and visual culture are represented. Tourism also becomes the light by which characters like Mrs. General, Mr. Casaubon, Miss Lavish, and Mr. Eager are exposed as ignorant and pretentious. At the same time, the melancholy of Amy Dorrit and Dorothea

Brooke is thrown into relief by the glamour of the Grand Tour and the frivolity of their fellow tourists. These withdrawn and long-suffering tourists gain our sympathy because they make such bad tourists. Isabel Archer’s enthusiasm as a tourist leads directly to an unhappy marriage to Osmond, revealing a pattern of problematic relationships between female fictional tourists and the culture of tourism.

On the other end of the spectrum, Lucy and George seem to be the only willing tourists who find a somewhat happy ending, but the same cannot be said of Eustace,

Philip Herriton, Lilia Herriton, Caroline Abbott, or Miss Raby. Forster’s representation of tourism is somewhat different because he shifts at least some attention to the Italian people, however stereotypical these representations may be. In the end, Forster presents tourism as a destructive force upon the very cities, cultures, and people it seeks to aesthetically enjoy. Like James’s travel writing, Forster’s fiction shows the destabilizing and destructive consequence of coming too close to the object of the picturesque gaze.

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Chapter 4

Tourism in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction:

The Ephemera of Travel

When the party of English tourists in Forster’s “The Story of Panic” describes the landscape as picturesque, Leyland, the artistic anti-tourist, counters them, explaining,

“[I]t would make a very poor picture. Indeed, it is not paintable at all…you all confuse the artistic view of nature with the photographic” (7). By the time Forster wrote the story, sometime around 1902, the ties between Gilpin’s definition of the picturesque and the ways in which tourists understood the term had been mostly severed. Leyland contradicts his companions because they do not understand the requisite distance, height, and perspective necessary for picturesque aesthetics.

Photography, particularly landscape photography which was increasingly associated with tourism, had originally been based on “the artistic view of nature,” but, over time, new aesthetics, landscapes, framing devices, and photographic technologies began to develop, leaving behind only traces of the picturesque. At the same time, the implication of Leyland’s remarks reach beyond purely aesthetic considerations towards questions of reproducibility and circulation. In comparison to the picturesque, the photographic is a more modern way of seeing, one that can capture landscapes that are beautiful, though may not be, strictly speaking, picturesque. At the same time, photography can also document the disturbing,65 like Eustace’s “peculiar smile” (14), which can then be reproduced and circulated by newspapers.

65 See Alphonse Bertillon’s photographs of criminals and Adrien Tournachon’s photographs of Guillaume- Benjamin-Amand Duchenne’s experiments with electrotherapy for treating mental illness. 165

In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin criticizes the increased mechanization of photography and, in particular, photographic reproductions of artworks:

Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one

element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place

where it happens to be…One might subsume the eliminated element in the

term “aura” and go on to say: that which withers in the age of mechanical

reproduction is the aura of the work of art. (1169)

Yet Benjamin leaves “aura” only vaguely defined; we understand his meaning only through context. The photograph of The Virgin of the Rocks, for instance, lacks “aura” because the photograph was never touched by Di Vinci’s own hands. Otherwise,

Benjamin understands aura as some elusive quality that is associated with originality and authenticity:

The presence of the original is the prerequisite to the concept of

authenticity... The whole sphere of authenticity is outside technical—and,

of course, not only technical—reproducibility. Confronted with its manual

reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original

preserved all its authority; not so vis-à-vis technical reproduction. (1169)

Studies of tourism are similarly dominated by questions of authority, originality, and authenticity. Which guidebook can be trusted as the greatest authority on Giotto? How can a travel writer leave the beaten track and have an original, unscripted experience with a foreign culture? Boorstin would counter these questions by asserting that tourists are

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not really seeking authenticity at all, but rather searching for “pseudo-events” (102) that are manufactured to fit their preconceptions, expectations, and stereotypes.

Figure 1. La trahison des images (1928 – 1929)

Whatever originality or authenticity that Boorstin, or Ruskin a century earlier, laments has been lost is comparable to Benjamin’s “aura” in that it is a vaguely defined quality that disappears in mass production or increased democratization. Whether in tourism or art, twentieth-century theorists are preoccupied by questions of production and reproduction. This discussion is epitomized by two notable paintings by René Magritte.

First, La trahison des images (The Treachery of Images, 1928 – 1929) (Figure 1) points a finger at its own production: “This is not a pipe,” it says, “it is a reproduced image of a pipe.” Despite Magritte’s Surrealist aesthetic, his paintings demand a literal reading, drawing attention to their own function within systems of reproduction. Second, La reproduction interdite (Not to Be Reproduced, 1937) (Figure 2) seems to counter

Benjamin’s thesis, saying that art, by its very nature, cannot be reproduced. As scholars of the nineteenth century, we continue to rely heavily on the same theorists and discourse despite the fact that it is impossible to apply these twentieth-century theories of visual

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aesthetics without introducing a range of caveats and disclaimers. This is particularly true when discussing tourism, which is always a performance that repeats texts, images, and other reproductions. Tourism exists only in reproduction.

Figure 2. Magritte, La reproduction interdite (1937)

According to MacCannell, the process of “sight sacralization” begins when “the sight is marked off from similar objects as worthy for preservation” (44). These markers may be literal plaques displayed near the sight, or, “take many different forms: guidebooks, informational tablets, slide shows, travelogues, souvenir matchbooks, etc.”

(41). These are the textual, aesthetic, and often ephemeral lenses that tourists are looking through when they view the sight or create an imaginary geography out of a collections of signs. This is called the naming phase. It is followed by the framing and evaluation phase, in which objects are put behind glass or buildings are opened for visitors; in other words, the framing and evaluation phase is the process by which the tourist industry, under the guise of preservation or explicit commercialization, controls access to sights.

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The third phase of “sight sacralization” is enshrinement, when the framing devices used to set a sight apart become part of the sight itself. The phase most significant to studies of ephemera is the fourth and penultimate phase,66 which MacCannell terms mechanical reproduction: “the creation of prints, photographs, models or effigies of the object which are themselves valued and displayed. It is the mechanical reproduction phase of sacralization that is most responsible for setting the tourist in motion on his journey to find the true object” (45). An analysis of the mechanical reproductions, or ephemera, of tourism exposes the points at which the visual culture of tourism intersects with Victorian material culture. This ephemera—including photographs, postcards, posters, and luggage labels—serve as markers which establish anticipation for the tourist, that is, a sign of a given location which can be sought, and, if found, provide validation and authenticity to the tourist experience.

In addition to the semiotic function, ephemera also participate in the cultural consumption of sights. Just as the guidebooks’ star-system acts as a catalogue for purchasing sights, so too do ephemeral objects facilitate touristic consumption. Images incite the desire for possession, as Benjamin explains in “A Short History of

Photography”: “Day by day the need becomes greater to take possession of the object— from the closest proximity—in an image and the reproduction of the image” (209).

Photographs, postcards, and luggage labels provide material proof of symbolic purchase.

Tourists can actually purchase a sight, or at least the mechanical reproduction of that sight, which, within the world of touristic practices as I describe, is essentially the same thing, if not better.

66 MacCannell explains, “The final stage of sight sacralization is social reproduction, as occurs when groups, cities, and regions begin to name themselves after famous attractions” (45). 169

The tourists who purchase these photographs from dealers or, later, take photographs for themselves, are perpetually mediated by the tropes of visual culture— aestheticized distance, perspective, decay, and poverty. Throughout the history of photography, which owes so much to the tradition of classical painting, photographers such as Henry Fox Talbot, Maxime du Camp, Carlo Naya, and Felice Beato have drawn upon the vocabulary and structure of the picturesque. These photographs confirm what tourists always believed or read in their guidebooks.

By the 1890s, postcards could be collected as souvenirs or sent home to friends and family, further proof of touristic experiences, with the added benefit of inciting jealousy among acquaintances. Of course, postcards then became markers of anticipation for aspiring future tourists. Likewise, travel posters and luggage labels served a wide range of purposes. Originally used by porters on ships and trains to mark the bags’ destinations, they soon became signs of the tourist’s experiences and travels. Eventually, along with travel posters, luggage labels became advertisements for hotels, resorts, and ocean liners. These advertisements promoted tourism and simultaneously informed the tourist of what they would see, as well as what they should seek and later photograph, that is, reproduce for themselves. If tourists are, as Culler writes, “agents of semiotics”

(155), advertisements for hotels and tour companies were, and still are, remarkably effective at teaching tourists a vocabulary of signs and how to sign-see.

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Reading Tourist Photography

Since most theories of tourism consider the twentieth-century postmodern tourist, whether travelling by jumbojet or station wagon, photography is a central theme. Mike

Robinson and David Picard explain, “To be a tourist, it would seem, involves taking photographs. Whilst photography is clearly not the exclusive preserve of tourists it nonetheless is one of the markers of being a tourist, is intimately linked to the doing and performing of tourism” (1, emphasis original). This is certainly true in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, when tourism and photography are so inextricable that it is nearly impossible to approach one without confronting the other. Karen Burns provides a historically-based explanation, linking photography to tourism by way of the Industrial

Revolution:

Frequently, the relation is figured by analogy. A connection is assumed

between one kind of machine (the camera), and another (the steam

engine)…The authors of a survey book entitled Masters of Early Travel

Photography figure the similarity through the principle of speed: the

accelerated speed of train travel is comparable to the rapidity of the

camera’s image making capacities; that is, like the railway, the camera can

potentially conquer time. (25)

While there is undoubtedly a clear, causal relationship between the steam engine and the rise of mass tourism, I would argue that photography has less in common with the steam engine than it does with the literature of mass tourism: the guidebooks and travelogues written during the nineteenth century.

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Louis Daguerre’s first iodized silver plates were introduced to the public in 1839, only three years after John Murray’s first Handbook for Travellers on the Continent. Like the guidebook, the daguerreotype, and the various photographic processes that followed, attempted to capture the world as clearly, as accurately, and as “truthfully” as possible.

Guidebooks made the world seem familiar and more knowable by documenting as many details as possible within a small, pocket-sized book. Photography functioned in essentially the same ways: by the 1860s, tourists could see a dozen different views of the

Coliseum, for instance, before ever leaving home. By the time they reached Rome, they knew exactly what to expect because they had been carrying precise replicas of the sight tucked between the pages of their guidebooks.

Photographs are also similar to guidebooks in that they are part of the complex semiotic system that establishes signs, perpetuates consumption, and, of course, first sets the tourist off in search of sites. As Urry explains, “Places are chosen to be gazed upon because there is anticipation” (3), and anticipation, in turn, originates from ephemera. By the mid-nineteenth century, the abundance of photographic images played a pivotal role in inspiring travel and sign-seeing. Many photographers specialized in picturesque landscapes, the ruin-filled urban picturesque, or whatever else signified as “authentic.”

Thus, the same semiotic system found in the literature of travel is made visible by the photography of travel and tourism. Photographs of Egypt usually include some seemingly requisite numbers of signs of what was (and is, according to the tourist industry) essentially Egypt: the Sphinx, pyramids, Bedouins, and of course, the ubiquitous camel.

Elephants play the same role in photographs of India. In both cases, the respective

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animals became signs for exoticism, adventure, the grandeur of lost civilizations, and, finally, colonial power.

Just as the guidebook checklist is inextricably related to the commodification of foreign cities and peoples, photographs prove even more salient to the consumption of sights and cultures. The photograph, argues Peter Osborne, is “the perfect product of its economic culture—a commodity in its own right” (9). Whether purchased from a dealer or, later, taken by the tourists themselves, photographs prove “I was here,” or perhaps even “Here I am still.” Roland Barthes writes in Camera Lucida, “The Photograph is never anything but an antiphon of ‘Look,’ ‘See,’ ‘Here it is’; it points a finger at certain vis-à-vis, and cannot escape this pure deictic language” (5). The meaning of the photograph is not based exclusively on context, but is instead always- already multivalent. Barthes sees the physical object of the photograph and the subject of the photograph as indistinguishable, comparing the pair to the metaphorical binary of window and landscape: “Whatever it grants to vision and whatever its manner, a photograph is always invisible: it is not it that we see” (6). Instead, we see, firstly, the subject of the photograph, which, in Barthes view, is indistinguishable from the thing itself:

A specific photograph, in effect, is never distinguished from its referent

(from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally

distinguished from its referent (as is the case for every other image,

encumbered—from the start, and because of its status—by the way in

which the object is simulated); it is not impossible to perceive the

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photographic signifier…It is as if the Photograph always carries its

referent with itself. (5)

If we accept Barthes’s equation, then we must also accept symbolic ownership as the next logical step: owning a photograph of a sight is necessarily equivalent to owning the sight itself. Susan Sontag writes, “To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed. It means putting oneself into a certain relation to the world that feels like knowledge—and therefore, like power” (4). This seems especially true in photographs of people. In addition to their semiotic and picturesque functions, travel photographs of people always bear traces of colonialism. Photography supplies a context in which the local is always the colonial subject, while the photographed tourist (not nearly so common in the nineteenth century as today) is almost always the laurelled conqueror.

A Brief History of Tourism and Photography

The history of photographic technology and the perceived truthfulness of the medium has been thoroughly covered elsewhere (Green-Lewis, Armstrong), but it is worth noting here that photography, as Derek Gregory explains, “was inscribed within an ideology of realism that reinforced a distinctive regime of truth” (205). The verisimilitude of photographs meant that it was no longer necessary to rely on the sentimentality or ornamentation of travel writers and painters. It is not simply that photography is analogous to the guidebook—though it certainly is—but that both are products of, and catalysts for, the nineteenth-century obsession with Realism.

Like guidebooks, questions of photography’s realism, accuracy, and precision are similarly problematic. The origins of both can be traced back to the camera obscura and

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even the Claude glass; that is, photography, like the picturesque, has an inherent implied distance between the subject/photographer and the object/photographed. Osborne writes that “We look on or look through eyes educated to see the same ontological remoteness”

(82). This is the ontology of the picturesque gaze, inherited from the aesthetics of painting, which not only includes distance, but also the idealization of the landscape and fetishization of ruins and rustic peasants.

Figure 3. Talbot, Loch Katrine

The indebtedness to traditional aesthetics of painting is apparent in many of

William Henry Fox Talbot’s early calotypes. Talbot’s experiments with photosensitive paper, which were concurrent to Daguerre’s development of silver-ionized glass plates, were a direct result of Talbot’s own experiences as a tourist. While on his honeymoon to

Lake Como in 1833,67 Talbot grew increasingly frustrated with his inability to accurately capture the Italian countryside, and although accuracy may have been Talbot’s driving

67 Batchen, Geoffrey. “History: 1, Antecedents and Photography up to 1826.” Encyclopedia of Nineteenth- Century Photography. Ed. John Hannavy. Vol. 1. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. 666 – 674. (672) 175

impetus for developing the negative/positive process, the calotypes he eventually produced were not entirely divorced from the traditional, Romantic landscapes of the picturesque. In a series of photographs of Loch Katrine (see Figure 3), Talbot points his camera somewhere into the middle distance, past the trees which frame and partially obscure the foreground, while Scottish hills rise in the background. These photographs were published in Talbot’s book, Sun Pictures of Scotland (1845), which included the announcement, “Most of the views represent scenes connected with the life and writings of Sir Walter Scott” (qtd. in Westover 165). Paul Westover writes:

Sun Pictures¸ remembered by most historians as the first book of

landscape photography, was just as importantly the first ever work to

contain photographs of literary landmarks. Riding the popularity of the

still-booming Scott industry, it included photos of Abbotsford, Loch

Katrine, Melrose Abbey, Edinburgh’s new Scott Monument, and—little

surprise here—the tomb of Scott in Dryburgh Abbey. (165)

Talbot’s photograph of Dryburgh Abbey is particularly evocative because it emphasizes the picturesque ruins, following the tradition of J. M. W. Turner’s The Chancel and

Crossing of Tintern Abbey, Looking towards the East Window (1794). Talbot’s photographs coincide with the expansion of the railway into previously remote districts such as the Scottish borderlands and the Kendal and Windmere extension into the Lake

District, which Wordsworth famously protested in the pages of the Morning Post.

Talbot’s photographs not only participated in the Romanticization of the landscape, as did the literature that inspired him, but Talbot also established a precedent for future photographers to seek out picturesque sights.

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Figure 4. Stieglitz, At Lake Como (1893)

Six decades later, the American photographer Alfred Stieglitz visited Lake Como, where Talbot first dreamt of fixing an image. Stieglitz’s At Lake Como (1893) bears a strong resemblance to Loch Katrine, with its calm water and mountains rising in the hazy distance. One noticeable difference is Stieglitz’s local women washing laundry while men load goods onto boats. Stieglitz focuses on these people in the foreground, but they are still merely ornaments on the landscape, signs of local color, their faces turned away from the camera.

As the tourist imagination looked further abroad, beyond the British Isles or Italy, the picturesque was, to borrow a term from photography, super-imposed over landscapes that did not easily conform to Gilpin’s ideas. In Francis Frith’s Great Pyramid and

Sphinx (Figure 5), distance is condensed; the Sphinx draws our eye to the foreground, while the Great Pyramid replaces the traditional mountain, now moved to the middle distance. Still, three figures dressed in the garb of Bedouin guides sit on the ground to the right, while a single figure stands closer to the Sphinx to provide scale. Here, as in landscape paintings, these figures serve a triple duty: they ornament the near distance

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with local color, they balance the painting with well-ordered groupings, and they add scale to the scene. As it turns out, peasants in Egypt, Morocco, China, or Brazil not only serve the same functions in the tourist gaze, they are the same happy, child-like rustics in the tourist imagination. Only the costumes have changed; the roles remain the same.

Figure 5. Frith, Great Pyramid and Sphinx (1858)

Not surprisingly, many of the early large-scale photographic expeditions were colonial projects. In 1849 – 1850, Maxime du Camp traveled up the Nile with Gustave

Flaubert, taking calotypes for Description de l’Égypte, a scientific, photographic, and cartographic survey of the region. Describing Du Camp’s Egyptian images, Derek

Gregory writes, “Early photographers tacitly represent Egypt as a vacant space awaiting its (re)possession and reclamation by Europe…In effect, the photographic imaginary rendered the remains of Egypt as a transparent space that could be fully ‘known’ by the colonial gaze” (207). This effect is not exclusive to France’s relationship with Egypt, which was specifically colonial, but can also be seen in Britain’s relationship with Italy, in which colonialism is more subtle but none the less effective.

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Steve Garlick describes the power dynamic of the tourist/ photographic gaze:

“The look (or the photograph), in a sense, deprives people of their agency, of their ability to construct their own lives and, on this account, would thus prevent any relationship between tourist and local resident as two autonomous subjects” (292). Through photography, the photographer and the person photographed are made separate and unequal. Power and mastery belongs to the photographer who constructs the identity of the person being photographed as “the Other;” and, more importantly, the image of the

Other is crucial in constructing the identity of the self. Garlick argues:

Here it is not so much who or what is photographed that is most

significant, but rather, the process whereby touristic photography, by

producing knowledge of the other, allows for the production of the

subjectivity of the tourist…Photography of ‘others’ can play an important

role in determining how one conceives oneself. In photographing the

‘other’, the emphasis is primarily on difference, that is difference from

‘me’, who is thereby defined by the relation. (296)

In other words, the camera itself colonizes whatever falls within the frame of the photograph, creating a knowledge-power dynamic between the photographer—and by extension the viewer of the photograph—and the person or place being photographed.

The deictic language of the photograph, to use Barthes’s terminology, says not only “I was here,” but also “This is mine.”

More often than not, however, the local communities, who frequently shelter in these empty spaces among the ruins of ancient civilizations, are excluded from photographs. Before the photographer ever looked through the lens, people were

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removed, their belongings relocated, their children kept from play, so that the splendor of an imagined past could be photographed. Gregory refers to these absences as “erasures” of photography: “Du Camp’s images remove from the field of vision any trace of the villages that the fellahin (the peasants) had constructed inside (and outside of) the ruins”

(201). Egypt becomes a space of the tourist imagination, rather than a real place with living inhabitants. Writing of Du Camp’s photographs of Edfu, Gregory later adds, “The only human figure who regularly appears in them is a young member of the crew, Hadji

Ishmael, who was included, so Du Camp explained, to scale the image” (202). That is, humans, wherever they appear, are less like individuals than they are units of measurement.

The Egyptian photography of both Du Camp and Frith demonstrates the changing constructions of space in the mid-1850s. The picturesque was based on variation, whether in distance, color, or texture. Though there were no mountains, cliffs, or rivers to break up the view, what photographers of Egypt, Morocco, or Palestine wanted most to convey was space, the vast expanse of sand reaching out into the horizon as far as the eye could see. The ruins were pulled from the middle-distance into the foreground because that is what the tourist, either abroad or at home in an armchair, would be most interested in seeing.

By the mid-1850s, this construction of space was not just an aesthetic choice; by that time, the stereoscope had changed how images were consumed and space was imagined. As Jonathan Crary explains: “It is easily forgotten now how pervasive was the experience of the stereoscope and how for decades it defined a major mode of experiencing photographically produced images” (116). In Techniques of the Observer,

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Crary describes the development of stereoscopic technology in conjunction with the ever- increasing emphasis on optical phenomena. The three dimensional effect of the stereoscope is produced out of the slight difference between two nearly-identical photographs of the same scene. The mind reads that difference as a “conjuration,” an optical illusion, produced by “the observer’s experience of the differential between two images” (122). The traditional tripartite structure of the picturesque no longer functions under these new optical rules because there is not a significant differential between the relative positions of mountains, cliffs, or clouds in the far-distance in stereoscopic images, thus the contraction of space. As Crary explains:

The stereoscope…provided a form in which ‘vividness’ of the effect

increased with the apparent proximity of the object to the viewer, and the

impression of three-dimensional solidity became greater as the optical

axes of each diverged. Thus the desired effect of the stereoscope was not

simply likeness, but immediate apparent tangibility…Pronounced

stereoscopic effects depend on the presence of objects or obtrusive forms

in the near or middle ground; that is, there must be enough points in the

image that require significant changes in the angle of convergence of the

optical axes. Thus the most intense experience of the stereoscopic images

coincides with an object-filled space. (122, 124)

Rather than marking the complete end of the picturesque, traces of the aesthetic persist even within stereographs. As with landscape painting, stereoscopes require roughness and variety to add interest to the scene; therefore, foregrounds scattered with ruins work particularly well for stereoscopic images. Crary claims that the “stereoscopic

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relief or depth has no unifying or logical order” (125), but it is actually more of a reordering of space. Edmond Behles’s stereographic images of Rome (Figure 6), probably taken in the 1870s, clearly demonstrates this reordering in which the ruins are brought close to the observer, while all other signs of life are removed. If the photographs of Frith and Du Camp are composed to show the expanse of empty space, Behles’s later stereographs show cluttered space and the enormity of scale—distance is no longer important; height and proximity are more impressive to the viewer looking through a stereoscope. The stereoscope significantly altered and reestablished conventions of photography. Many of the old conventions of picturesque remained—the romanticization of ruins and peasants, for example—yet space had contracted so that the eye of the observer, the photographer, and by extension, the tourist, was focused on the near distance and foreground.

Figure 5. Behles, Forum Trajanum, Rome

As the technology for producing photographs and stereographs became more advanced, so too did the technologies for reproducing and circulating images. As photographs became more affordable, they became requisite touristic purchases. Along

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with all the necessary information for currency exchange, postal services, and hospitable lodging, guidebooks list the name of prominent photographers who specialize in images produced for the tourist trade. In Florence, Brecker’s was located near St. Mark’s English

Church and was popular with tourists for carrying photographers by Giorgio Sommer, while Brogi’s, on Via Tournabuoni specialized in photographs of artworks, like the ones

Lucy Honeychurch purchases near the Piazza della Signoria.

One of the most prominent photographers in Italy was the Venetian Carlo Naya, whose shop was conveniently located in Piazza San Marco, and, according to the 1906

Baedeker’s Guide to Northern Italy, carried a wide range of photographs, “from the smallest at about 50 c. to the large and expensive size (28 by 36 inches), copies from drawings 1 ½, from original pictures 4 fr.” (231). Naya offered an extensive selection of

Venetian cityscapes, views of canals (Figure 7), and photographs of artworks, many of which were numbered and are now highly prized by collectors. Nearby was the shop of

Naya’s associate and frequent collaborator, Carlo Ponti, inventor of the megalethoscope and pioneer of visual effects. Both studios were successful enough to stay in business long after their respective proprietors’ deaths,68 and perhaps more extraordinary, these shops existed well beyond the advent of the snapshot camera in 1888.

68 In fact, at Baedeker’s writing, both Carlo Naya (1816 - 1882) and Carlo Ponti (1823 – 1893) were already deceased. 183

Figure 7. Naya, Venezia69

In the 1890s, the introduction of the postcard exponentially increased the circulation of photographs. In the aptly named article, “Wishing They Were There: Old

Postcards and Library History,” Bernadette A. Lear explains that:

Although they are just beginning to be treated seriously by scholars,

postcards are artifacts of several national phenomena, including changes in

printing technology, postal regulations, forms of communication, popular

culture, and travel…During the late nineteenth century, advances in

photography, papermaking, typography, and printing lowered the cost of

producing handsome illustrations. (79)

Postcards are an indispensable part of the relationship between tourism and photography, particularly as it relates to the consumption and circulation of tourist ephemera. Mark

Wollaeger explains some of the changes in the British postal system that helped advance

69 This image was also produced as a stereograph. Pont produced an almost identical photograph in which the gondoliers are wearing white. 184

the popularity of postcards: “In 1899 British postal regulations permitted the standard- sized card already used in Europe to circulate freely, and a special postal rate of one halfpenny for domestic delivery encouraged Edwardians to send postcards on the slightest pretext: ‘Hope to be in time for tea this afternoon!’” (45). Postcards were cheap souvenirs to collect or send home to friends and family, further proof of touristic experiences. Just as photographs say “Here I am,” the tourist can scrawl the stereotypical

“Wish you were here!” while the more immediately implied message may translate as “I am here, and you are not.”

In 1888, the Eastman Kodak Company introduced the first Brownie Camera, which was inexpensive, small, and easily portable, enabling tourists to reproduce sights for themselves. The act of photography functions in similar ways as, and in conjunction with, checking off sights in a guidebook; or, as Susan Sontag puts in, photography is “a way of certifying experience”:

Travel becomes a strategy for accumulating photographs. The very

activity of taking pictures is soothing, and assuages general feelings of

disorientation that are likely to be exacerbated by travel. Most tourists feel

compelled to put the camera between themselves and whatever is

remarkable that they encounter. Unsure of other responses, they take a

picture. This gives shape to experience: stop, take a photograph, and move

on. (10)

Tourists have always been criticized for travelling to distant lands for the sole purpose of checking off a list of must-see sights, but the camera exacerbates that impulse.

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In a manner of speaking, the camera is not unlike the Claude glass. It is a literal lens through which to view—and reproduce—the world from a safe vantage point. This aestheticization is inescapable because, as Jennifer Green-Lewis points out, “To one looking through the lens of a camera, of course, the world is inherently and already framed” (Framing the Victorians 123). Not unlike the Claude glass, the camera allows the photographer to decide which view should be captured and what should be excluded from photographic and cultural memory. Rather than a distinct and drastic departure, tourist photography absorbs and repeats the principles and practices of traditional visual culture.

Furthermore, once exposed to travel photography, brochures, and other images, the tourist seeks out those same sights and perspectives. Osborne claims, “Much of tourist photography is quotation—a reprising of the contents of the brochures, or the reproduction of a view that as likely as not came into existence as a consequence of photography. Tourist photography is more a process of confirmation than discovery”

(79). This critique is well familiar to anyone who has read histories of the guidebook, but

I am particularly struck here by Osborne’s notion of photography as quotation. This “self- enclosed” system of repetition and quotation is fundamentally related to the repetitive personae and performances adopted by tourists, but rather than following a guidebook or travelogue, these photographic tourists seek out and repeat the visual image(inary) of previous photographers. These acts of repetition are part of the tourist performance as described by Adler, Seaton, and Osborne, the latter of whom writes, “The world of the tourist is ‘over there’, in the past-present, in the exotic-ordinary. It is framed off, the object of imagining or description, in some spectacular distance, or set back as

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performance” (82). Tourism itself is analogous to photography: both are staged and framed reproductions.

Despite that distance, by taking pictures that attempt to capture the true “essence” of a place, the photographer is not only claiming an intimate knowledge of that culture, but she is also constructing an identity for herself as a participant in that culture. Garlick explains the role the camera plays in creating an illusion of the tourist’s involvement within the photographed scene: “The camera mediates reality for the tourist, it gives shape to his or her experience, and significantly…it conveys the appearance of participation in the situation” (291). By taking photographs of romance in Paris, it implies that the photographer also experienced the romance of Paris. By taking pictures of exotic destinations, the tourist-photographer, who bears a resemblance to the tourist- reader and tourist-writer, can claim to have experienced the essential qualities—sexuality, danger, intrigue, adventure—of exoticism. At the same time, Garlick observes, “the participation is somewhat detached, as the activity of photography introduces an element of ‘distance’ into the situation” (291). While the photographer is able to perform an imaginary participation, the camera still serves as a screen of protection from any direct involvement which might make the tourist’s experience unpleasant, sully the essential signs, or destroy the imaginary geography.

Garlick writes, “Touristic photography [is] part of the quest to capture socially constructed ‘sights’ to which tourists are directed by semiotic ‘markers’” (290). But with photography, the tourist does not have to cross sites off of a list or check them in the guidebook: all you need is a picture. With the push of a button, the tourist validates and proves her experience. She has visited the sites that are culturally important and

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consumed them with her camera, thus claiming the cultural capital. Garlick adds,

“Clearly there is a thought that in ‘capturing’ people on film, tourists are in a sense converting them into resources. The photos later ‘stand by’, ready for (re)presentation to viewers as evidence, both of the holiday, and that the holiday experiences have been adequately catalogued” (294).

There are many subtle forms of mastery taking place in these scenarios. First, the tourist proves mastery over time—by preserving the moment indefinitely—and space— by claiming ownership of the photographed object. Garlick observes:

When we look at a photograph we reopen a particular time and

space of experience, there is a relation existing through both time

and space to the moment encapsulated in the picture. This moment

is at once eternal, and at the same time ephemeral, it has passed

and yet it continues to exist in the present. (296)

Indeed, preservation is a powerful impetus for photography, particularly travel and tourist photography. Tourists are not only trying to preserve the temporality of their experiences, but particularly in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, photographers were concerned with preserving what was left of ancient cultures before ruins crumbled into dust, or of documenting pre-modern, pre-industrial life before “civilization” had wiped away traces of peoples still living off the land.

In A Thousand Miles up the Nile (1877), Amelia Edwards makes the relationship between photography and preservation more clear when writing about the Temple at

Denderah, which had fallen victim to “Christian fanaticism” (181), that is iconoclasm, centuries before in the time of Nero:

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Among those that escaped, however, is the famous external bas-relief of

Cleopatra on the back of the Temple. This curious sculpture is now

banked up with rubbish for its better preservation, and can no longer be

seen by travellers. It was, however, admirably photographed some two or

three years ago by Signor Beati70 [sic]; which photograph is faithfully

reproduced in the annexed engraving. (182)

Indeed, the 1877 edition of Edwards’s travelogue includes an engraving made from the

Antonio Beato’s photograph, which allowed travellers to see those sites that have been hidden from view, while the site itself was otherwise preserved.

Contrastingly, Beato’s younger brother, Felice, is known to have preserved scenes that never quite happened. Felice Beato is known as one of the first photographers of the death and destruction of war, from the Crimea to the Opium Wars. Beato’s most famous photograph from the Indian Mutiny, Interior of the Secundra Bagh and after the

Slaughter of 2,000 Rebels by the 93rd Highlanders and the 4th Punjab Regt. First Attack of Sir Colin Campbell in November, 1857 (Figure 8), has come under scrutiny for reputedly being staged or constructed for affect. In the photograph, three men in local costume cluster around a pillar of the ruined palace. Nearby, another man stands with a horse, balancing out the grouping. Despite the otherwise picturesque staging, the foreground is littered with the skulls and dismembered bones of slaughtered Indians, completing a scene that would have made an affective, though macabre, stereograph.

70 In a later footnote, Edwards refers to photographs by “Signore Beata” (634), calling into question how accurate her text, particularly its footnotes, really is. 189

Figure 8. Beato, Interior of the Secundra Bagh

In Regarding the Pain of Others, Sontag writes of the photograph, “For the photograph he took in March or April 1858, Beato constructed the ruin as an unburial ground, stationing some natives by two pillars in the rear and distributing human bones about the courtyard” (54). Responding to Sontag, Fred Ritchen seems to defend the photographer, writing, “Given the constraints on Beato and his contemporaries, it is not surprising that there were times when scenes were rearranged” (123). Ritchen explains that war photographers like Beato, Roger Fenton, or, in America, Matthew Brady, often travelled with troops and documented battles and their immediate aftermath; in other cases, like Beato’s photograph of Secunda Bagh, the photographer may not reach the scene until months afterwards, making the documentary process somewhat difficult without these manipulations. Depending on who looked at Beato’s pictures, the images of the dead either spoke of the horrors of war or the unflinching power of British vengeance.

Yet their production calls into question the objectivity we typically associate with

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photographs in general, and with war photography in particular. Furthermore, Felice

Beato’s photographs imbued the landscape of China and India with the same spirit of adventure that his brother Antonio’s photographs gave to Egypt, and English tourists seemed preternaturally drawn to these sites of tragedy or carnage.

For amateur tourist-photographers, staging scenes proved considerably more difficult. In As Seen by Me, Lilian Bell is disappointed because photography, like language itself, is an inadequate medium for capturing the tourist’s experience of place.

In Chinon, France, Bell took a snapshot of an equestrian statue of Joan of Arc, but later

“reget[s] that the photograph I took of it is too small to show its fire and spirit and the mad rush of the horse, and the glorious, generous prose of the noble martyr’s outstretched arms, as she seems to be in the act of sacrificing her life to her country” (92). Even though her photographs cannot capture the spirit of the statue, the act of photography is an expression of her own rebellious spirit, delighting in taking pictures where it is expressly forbidden, as when photographing Tzar Nicholas II: “Now, the person of the

Tzar is so sacred it is forbidden by law even to represent him on the stage, and as to photographing him—a Russian faints at the mere thought” (175). Whether this was a serious prohibition or exaggerated by Bell for affect,71 she is determined to photograph the Tzar during an official ceremony, and she convinces herself it will be possible if for no other reason than the fact that she is American and, therefore, has been given her every request. Arrangements are indeed made, and she is allowed to the front of the crowd, hearing the repeated “’Americanski,’ which had so often opened hearts and doors to us, for Russia honestly likes America” (176). At just the perfect moment, the crowd

71 There were, in fact, many photographs taken of Tsar Nicholas II, including family snapshots, and he saw great possibilities in the medium, commissioning Sergei Prokudin-Gorskii, a pioneer in color photography, to produce a photographic survey of the Russian Empire. 191

parts. Bell looks through the camera, and her unnamed companion gives the signal:

“’Now!’ A little click. It was done; I had photographed Nicholas II., the Tzar of all the

Russians!” (176)72

Travelling from St. Petersburg to Constantinople, Bell once again attempts to defy laws against photographing the ruler, this time the Sultan of Turkey: “chiefly, I think, because it was forbidden. I have an ever-present unruly desire to do anything which these foreign countries absolutely forbid” (213). Bell is a wealthy socialite and would probably never have broken the law at home, yet she claims special status as an American tourist.

She also clearly admires the spectacle of the “foreign countries” even while ridiculing their respective ways of life. With Bell’s relish for melodrama, she relates the danger of being caught taking a photograph of the Sultan. Her Turkish guides warn her about spies and she “stood in deadly terror” of “two small boys with projecting ears” (217) in case their curiosity should notice and attract attention to the camera as Bell readies herself to photograph the Sultan. Bell writes, “He [the Sultan] looked up directly at us, and I snapped the shutter promptly. It was done” (217). As she does when photographing

Nicholas II, Bell uses short, clipped sentences to relay, first, the urgency and anticipation of the moment, and, then, the immediacy of the act. All it took was a single click, a rebellious finger and the push of a button.

Later, when Bell has the film developed, she learns that photography is not always so easy to control: “I discovered to my disgust that instead of the Sultan I had taken an excellent photograph of that wretched little boy’s ear” (217). Bell had taken for granted that tourist photography could be both clandestine and predictable, a far cry from

72 This story was original printed in The Ladies Home Journal as “Miss Bell Photographs the Czar.” July, 1898. (15). 192

the large, wooden boxes and long exposure times of Talbot’s days at Loch Katrine. In those sixty years, the camera had passed from the hands of the technicians, inventors, and scientists into the hands of the amateur.73

From Talbot to Bell, what the tourist wants most to capture is the ideal of a culture or, at least, something that represents an imagined essence of the place, signs taken from previous representations, or photographic and cinematic images, but sometimes, the essential is drawn from a conglomeration or simplification of the idealized place. Tourists want to capture images that are so closely associated to the essential qualities of a specific place that the photograph could not possibly be taken anywhere else.

For Barthes, the photograph is so closely related to the place, object, or person photographed that “A specific photograph…is never distinguished from its referent (from what it represents), or at least it is not immediately or generally distinguishable from its referent… [There is] something tautological about it: a pipe, here, is always and intractably a pipe” (5). I disagree: in fact, the photograph is always separate from its referent—there is something in the photograph that always speaks of the identity of the photographer. The picture of the pipe, to return to Margritte’s own iconic image, is never just a pipe—it is everything that a pipe is not: a painting, a joke, a metonym for an entire discourse about simulacra, and, most important, it is perhaps the most recognizable image of the artist himself. After all, the language we use to speak of art binds the painting to the identity of the artist, as if the artist has only reproduced himself: we point to the painting and say, “That is a Magritte.”

73 See Green-Lewis, Jennifer. Framing the Victorians: Photograph and the Culture of Realism. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell, 1996) particularly pages 37 – 64.

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Through the photographs taken during travels, tourists construct an identity that is based upon an ideal imaginary version of themselves—a cultured, powerful, masterful, unified whole. Each photograph that the tourist takes says simultaneously, “I was here,”

“I own that,” I am that,” “That is a part of my identity.” In this sense, the picture of a ruin or a peasant, for instance, may physically and literally be a photo of a ruin or a peasant, but it is also the image of the photographer—a photographer who claims mastery over time and space, ownership over the the image and its referent, and, through the photograph, came to see who he/she was as a tourist and photographer. That is, the picture of the other becomes an image of the self.

Promoting Tourism, Consuming Semiotics: Travel Posters and Luggage

Labels in the “Golden Age of Tourism”

The semiotic structure of tourism owes more to the development of nineteenth- century tourist ephemera than to any other medium, including photography. To create the ephemera of the tourist industry, particularly those travel posters and luggage labels that were designed to promote and commemorate tourist experiences, required a confluence of countless additional factors—an awareness of the power of advertisement, visual culture, a capitalist obsession with material culture, and, of course, Victorian print culture with its advancements in typography, lithography, printing, and circulation. Any discussion of the development of tourist ephemera relies upon an understanding of travel posters and luggage labels as products of a particular historic moment.

Because advertisement images were intentionally produced to pull the tourist to the sight, MacCannell’s definition of “material reproduction” is central to understanding

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printed promotional ephemera, as is Benjamin’s “The Work of Art in the Age of

Mechanical Reproduction.” While Benjamin regrets the loss of the “aura” in reproduced images, he does not account for what is gained from reproduction/ reproducibility: travel posters and luggage labels are works of art which originate in reproduction. Ephemera enable at least three vital functions of tourism and sign-seeing. First, these images invite rich readings of the signs and symbols that are communicated, however subtly or subconsciously, to the tourists. Second, tourist ephemera, because of its reproducibility, intensify the consumption of signs. As with photography, owning these images—and more significantly, publicly displaying ownership on the surface of one’s luggage—is as meaningful for tourists as owning the sight itself. Furthermore, while postcards and photographs were available for purchase, luggage labels were complimentary items, that is, free cultural capital.

In many cases, ephemera are based more on signs and stereotypes than on reality.

Ephemera, to borrow from Jean Baudrillard, are “simulacra,” fantasy reproductions without a referent. To explain this term, Baudrillard begins with metaphors of travel, discussing a map which no longer merely describes, but rather defines the territory it is supposed to represent: “Henceforth, it is the map that precedes the territory—the precession of simulacra—it is the map that engenders the territory” (1733). Tourist ephemera similarly participates in the engendering of territories, that is, the production of signs that stand in for places, peoples, or perspectives that, in many cases, never existed in reality. Even Gilpin instructs painters to exaggerate and idealize the landscape in order to achieve the picturesque. Baudrillard calls this “the generation by models of a real

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without origin or referent: a hyperreal,” a term adopted by Umberto Eco74 and others to discuss Late Capitalism in American culture, particularly postmodern tourism, but these same questions about the sign and referent can also be asked about nineteenth-century tourism. The Victorian tourist consumed images that were generally stereotypes and often had very little basis in reality. Advertisements allowed tourists to consume hyperreal fantasies about a given place, or even about themselves.

Finally, it is also important to examine the function of reproduced images as objects, that is, as artifacts of material culture. In A Sense of Things, Bill Brown defends his own focus on what we have come to call “thing studies”:

These are texts that, as I understand them, ask why and how we

use objects to make meaning, to make or remake ourselves, to

organize our anxieties and affections, to sublimate our fears and

shape our fantasies. They are texts that describe and enact an

imaginary possession of things that amounts to the labor of

infusing manufactured objects with a metaphysical dimension. (4)

Brown’s statement perfectly defines my own thinking about ephemera: the texts I discuss here are the things themselves, as well as a few literary examples that deal with ephemera. Tourists use these object-texts to organize and understand the world, to make it apprehendable and familiar in such a way that alleviates the anxieties of the “foreign,” while “mak[ing] and re-mak[ing] [them]selves” as cultured and affluent world-travellers.

The “metaphysical dimension” of these objects can be said to include both the ways in

74 Eco, Umberto. “Travels in Hyperreality.” Travels in Hyperreality. New York: Harcourt, 1986. Eco uses “hyperreality” to discuss both the literal, cultural practice of tourism and tourism as a metaphor for postmodern identity. See also, Dann, Graham M. S. The Tourist as a Metaphor of the Social World. Oxford: CABI, 2002. 196

which ephemera allows tourists “imaginary possession” of things and the ways in which ephemera contributes to imaginary geographies that mediate tourism.

Cook’s Tours and Advertisements

Thomas Cook and Son, who designed and marketed Cook’s Tours,75 was the first travel agency, as we understand the term today, and it is considered the first firm to use advertisement and ephemera for promoting tourism. In July 1841, Thomas Cook chartered a train for transporting approximately 500 passengers from Leicester to

Loughborough for a temperance rally. Cook negotiated the fare with the Midland

Counties Railway Company, which agreed to share the profits, while Cook also provided meals. Over the next few years, Cook continued to arrange travel for temperance events and, later, pleasure excursions for church and social groups. In 1851, Cook arranged transportation to the Great Exhibition, advertizing return fares “from York to London for a crown.” The poster (Figure 9) is a relatively simple announcement for passage to the

Great Exhibition of 1851, and it is one of the earliest known examples of Cook’s advertisements, as well as the first tour promoting sight-seeing. The introduction of

Cook’s Tours coincided with the growth of Victorian print culture. Cook had always understood the power of advertisement, even as early as the 1840s, a time when, as

Ailleen Fyfe explains, print advertisement in newspapers and books was in transition: “In the 1840s, the style of advertising was beginning to change. Advertisement ceased to be

75 Much of my information on the history of Thomas Cook and Co is taken from Lynne Withey’s comprehensive history, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 – 1950. I am also grateful for the assistance of Mr. Paul Smith, Company Archivist for Thomas Cook UK & Ireland, for providing images and clarifying particular points. 197

simply announcements of new titles and began to sell their products, using displays, fonts, pictures, and enticing slogans and promises” (166).

This becomes more apparent four years after the Great Exhibition when, in 1855,

Cook’s first tours abroad were launched to transport English tourists to the Exposition

Universelle in Paris. This is widely regarded as the birth of the modern tourist industry because of the size of the group, distance travelled, and the very fact that Cook opened up

Europe to a class of tourists who had previously been excluded. Cook’s famous “circular tours” of Europe began in 1863, followed by tours of North America in 1866 and Egypt and Palestine in 1869, only a few years after the first English edition of Baedeker, the

1861guide to The Rhine. By this time, Cook’s advertisements were more visual. It was no longer about delivering information, but about catching the eye, then communicating a wide range of ideas about tourism and travel. For Thomas Cook and Company, this meant establishing a visual vocabulary for advertising.

Figure 9 Figure 10

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In 1865, Cook wrote and published the “Guide to Cook’s Tours in France,

Switzerland, and Italy,” which was sold at W. H. Smith’s throughout Great Britain. It was not a guidebook, but rather information about tours offered by the firm. The cover of this guide (Figure 10) served as one of the first printed advertisements, and unlike the earlier poster, the 1865 guide included graphics, colors, and, perhaps most significantly, Cook’ name is clearly visible. The cover features a solitary and overtly picturesque traveller, whose romantic attire and pose is reminiscent of Caspar David Friedrich’s Wanderer above a Sea of Fog, while his walking staff and the rough, mountainous terrain of the background suggests a peripatetic tour of the picturesque landscape, rather than modern railway travel to Paris or Rome. In reality, Cook’s Tours were far from solitary. In an

1863 issue of the company’s house magazine Cook’s Excursions, Cook writes, “At this moment, I am surrounded in Paris with some 500 or 600 enterprising tourists and am expecting an addition of 400 or 500 more to-night” (qtd. in Buzard 56). The sheer number of Cook’s tourists explains why they were denigrated as herds and flocks. And, although Cook’s tourists were not as socially elite as the previous Grand Tourists, they would have hardly resembled the figure on the cover of Cook’s guide. However, these themes remain visible in Cook’s advertisements throughout the nineteenth century.

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Figure 11

By 1891, Cook’s advertisements (Figure 11) still held suggestions of the solitary traveler, though perhaps more fashionably dressed, but the barren background has been replaced by an altogether more exotic landscape of Cook’s global tours. In this image, the

British tourist sits in comfort, whether on an elephant, in a rickshaw, or in a sedan being carried by native servants—still with no mention of modern transportation, a trend that seems to continue until the 1930s when railways and ocean liners began wide-spread poster advertisement to promote a sense of romance within their own industries.

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Figure 12

Another important change in Cook’s advertisements during this era (Figure 11) is the appearance of the globe. Instead of a small figure within a towering landscape, the whole world now seems small and traversable. By 1905 (Figure 12), the peripatetic had returned, even more fashionably dressed, easily striding around the globe, and, perhaps most striking, Cook’s tourist was now a woman, speaking to the changing face and demographics of tourism that brought Lucy Honeychurch and Cousin Charlotte to

Florence in1908. By the turn of the century, women could travel, unhindered and without scandal, either alone or with another female companion.

Luggage Labels

As the First World War drew near, the era known as “The Golden Age of Travel” was drawing to a close. While advertisements such as Cook’s are still used in today’s

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tourist industry, the ephemeral objects most closely associated with that golden age is the luggage label. The fact that luggage labels are now essentially obsolete lends them an air of romantic nostalgia. The label was also the form of ephemera that, at least initially, served a utilitarian purpose outside of promotion. The luggage label developed from tags and, later, pasted cards placed on luggage for transport. Porters at stations or the tourists themselves could attach labels with final destinations, such as the city or hotel where one was staying. Hotel staff would then collect the baggage from the station, freeing the mind of wearied traveller. In a guidebook entitled Hints to Railway Travellers and Country

Visitors to London (1852), the author, whose name is given as “An Old Stager” but is usually attributed as Robert Smith Surtees, surmises, “After money, luggage labels are the greatest conducers to comfort in travelling” (5). Luggage labels were often only slips of paper attached with string, or for the more wealthy tourists, custom made cards or leather straps. In an 1890 issue of Cassell’s Family Magazine, the editor (most likely H.

G. Bonavia Hunt) writes:

At this season, when all the world and his wife and family are travelling,

new luggage labels have more than usual interest. One of the most recent

novelties in this direction is a book of well-named ‘Savetime’ labels,

which are ready gummed and show on each a large and distinctive letter or

figure on a boldly colored background. (575)76

These books contained thirty-two “Savetimes,” each with a matching stub that could be presented to porters for easily identifying luggage. Unfortunately, these labels have been lost to time, however praised their bold colors and graphics once were.

76 This short article appears right below an inch-column on mustache cups as another example of a recommended purchase for tourists. 202

In the 1830s, hotels began ordering high-quality paper stock used to produce hotel bills, calling cards, and stationery. Around the mid-nineteenth century, hotels began to paste these card-stock images directly onto luggage to mark them for transit, and by the

1880s, hotels had begun distributing labels produced specifically for this purpose. Just as

Cook’s early advertisements showed a single traveller in a picturesque landscape, these early luggage labels showed the hotel in isolation, usually cut off from surrounding buildings, and sometimes nestled within mountains (Figure 13). Small figures often dotted the scene to add scale to the grandeur of the hotel.

Figure 13

According to Joao-Manuel Mimoso,77 who has written one of the only histories of luggage labels, the etchings found on these early labels are similar to the still earlier designs found on cartes porcelaines, an early carte de visite which was produced in

Belgium in the mid-nineteenth century. These trade cards or business cards were used to promote hotels and other business. The glossy, “porcelain” finish was lead-based and thus discontinued in the 1860s to avoid hazardous exposure. By the 1880s, advancements

77 Mimoso is widely regarded as one of the foremost collectors of luggage labels. His personal website includes one of the only known histories of labels. Information given here is attributed to both his website and interviews which I have conducted with Mr. Mimoso. URL http://www.tabacaria.com.pt/labels/general/history1/history1.htm 203

in printing brought several stylistic changes, including round labels, which made pealing at corners less likely, and lithographically printed red borders like the one below, center, which are called “belt labels” (Figure 14) and frequently include a buckle motif within the red border, reminiscent of the straps found on luggage. A decade later, further advancements in lithography and printing broadened the color palette and varied the typeface for a much more stylized appearance favored by fin-de-siècle aesthetics, as in the label produced by Richter & Co. for Bertolini’s Palace (Figure 15).

Figure 14 Figure 15

Figure 16

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In a shrewd, counter-intuitive marketing maneuver, the hotel began to disappear from travel posters and luggage labels, which were often printed from the same design.

Mimoso, writing about the Hotel Europe label (Figure 16), explains: “For the first time, a figurative label does not show the hotel building but rather focuses on a street scene and inludes a local attraction (the cathedral of Milan)” (n.pag).78 The hotels were essentially promoting the city, understanding that once pulled there by the “mechanical reproduction” of romantic labels and posters, tourists would need a place to stay. Rather than the hotel nestled in mountains, the city itself seems to become an urban picturesque, with the washed out spires of the cathedral towering into the sky in place of snow-capped peaks. Contrastingly, the stylized blue-scale of the lithograph print gestures forward to a modernist, or even post-impressionist aesthetic. This becomes even more apparent with the vibrant yellows and purples of the Grand Hotel and the Grand Hotel Royal, both in

Naples (Figures 17 and 18).

Figure 17 Figure 18

Like the Milan label, the Grand Hotel Royal label (Figure 18) includes local scenery, or at least signs of local scenery, rather than an image of the hotel itself. Mimoso

78 http://www.tabacaria.com.pt/labels/general/history2/history2.htm 205

observes, “If travelers want to show off to the world marks of the places they visit, then why not design labels around local attractions, activities and surrounding scenery?”(n. pag.) Instead of marking where the tourist was going, the luggage label became a marker of where the tourist had been, inciting envy in anyone who saw the label-covered luggage. Thus the function of luggage labels had developed in multiple, tangential ways out of its original purpose as hotel proprietors began seeing labels as valuable tools for advertisement. In the process, luggage labels took an increasingly important role in the formation of semiotics, that is, how labels facilitate the production of signs of place, which then became markers for the promotion and anticipation of place.

By the turn of the century, several producers of posters and labels had risen to prominance. The most influential of these was the Neapolitan printing house Richter &

Co, which produced bank notes, financial documents, and other valuable commodities in the paper trade. Under the artistic direction of Mario Borgoni (Mimoso n. pag.),79 Richter became the leading producer of stylish luggage labels, relying heavily on stereotypical representations and shorthand signifiers; thus, a survey of luggage labels provides a visual record of tourist semiotics. As with photographs of Egypt, regional hotel labels almost always include camels and the pyramids, and because there were not yet strict copyright laws, the same label could be produced for multiple hotels by multiple printing companies. Richter’s designs often include a border with their distinctive font, or some other framing device, such a window or doorway. This feature harkened back to the label’s roots, demonstating the close connections between traditional fine arts and the emerging advertisement industry.

79 http://www.tabacaria.com.pt/labels/artists/Borgoni/Mario.htm 206

Figure 19 Figure 20 Figure 21

Another recurring design feature in Richter’s labels is the silhouette. In the

Shepheard’s Hotel label (Figure 21), the dark figure in the foreground is exoticized by the shape of the figure’s costume and beard. Local populations are rarely illustated, but when they are it is most often in these highly racialized ways. North Africans are always darkened and indistinguishable, while the white faces of tourists are much more frequently visible and usually smiling. While this could be read as simply a limitation of technology and a restrictive color pallet, by eliminating any detail from a face or sight, it is more easily interpreted as a sign of the essential characterstics of a given location. For the Milan label (Figure 16), the silhouette of the Duomo speaks more to the tourists’ experience of the city than a sketch of the hotel would, while in the Grand Hotel in

Naples label (Figure 17), even the hotel appears in silhouette. As with the accompanying

Gd. Hotel Royal label (Figure 18), a silhouette of Mount Vesuvius, with a thin column of smoke rising from its peak, frequently appears as a sign of Naples.

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Figure 22 Figure 23 Figure 24

What the designers and printers—and the hotels which commissioned posters and labels—chose to represent and how they chose to illustrate a particular hotel, city, or culture contributed to the formation and circulation of semiotics. If tourists travel in search of signs of the “essential” in a given culture, then what constitutes as “essential” was increasingly determined by nineteenth-century tourist advertisements. The images and graphics used in promotional materials taught tourists what they should be looking for. A Victorian or Edwardian tourist had not properly seen Constantinople until she had seen the Blue Mosque. Anticipation was intensified by witholding the sight from view, that is, by showing it only in silhouette and shadows (Figure 22). For good measure, the addition of the indecipherable Arabic script added an air of mystery, exoticism, even danger to the tourist experience (Figure 23). In 1923, after the First World War, the

Ottoman Empire crumbled, creating the state of Turkey, and Constantinople officially became Istanbul. The transition had little impact on posters and luggage labels because the the signs of Istanbul, with its exoticized history and landscape, remained the same

(Figure 24).

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Once tourists had constructed an imaginary geography composed of visual cues taken from travel posters and luggage labels, the tourist could then, to return to Brown’s description, “make or remake [them]selves;” in other words, once the world was understood in a specifically touristic way, the tourist was able to imagine their own subject position in relation to the world, the foreign, or the Other. In a recent study of the value systems encoded in early-twenty-first century tourist advertizements, Teresa E. P.

Delfin offers an updated and more explicily identity-oriented take on MaCannell’s idea of tourist anticipation, which Delfin describes as “recruiting” tourists. It is a subtle but somewhat subversive turn of phrase. “Anticipation” is an emotion, with typically positive connotations; whereas recruitement suggests something more sinister, or at best a militia, perhaps Culler’s “unsung armies of semiotics” (155). Furthermore, tourists are not drawn to sights merely by an emotion or desire to travel, but advertisements recruit tourists because they have the power to make us think differently about ourselves. Delfin describes this as “the imaginatively engaging and identity constituting process of recruitment” (139).

To give an example, Delfin describes a man looking through a catalog and admiring a wool pea-coat, comparing it to other coats he has owned, and imagining himself in this particular coat: “Then recruitment is accomplished. Not only has our subject been recruited to purchase a coat, but in the process of weighing the decision, he has also become ‘a wool pea coat kind of guy’” (140). In other words, not only do objects allow us to “remake” ourselves, but even the idea or anticipation of the object fundamentally alters how we see ourselves. Delfin’s thesis is arguably related to Seaton’s theories of touristic identity making, for in becoming a “wool pea coat kind of guy” or an

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adventurer-explorer, we are performing metensomatic identities drawn from disparate sources. Drawing on Althusser’s theories of the inherent ideological origins of desire,

Delfin argues:

If anything, tourism only exaggerates the claims being made about

consumption. The would-be tourist considers how the experience being

offered correlates with what she does desire or could desire, and then takes

this a step further to not only include herself in her image of the tourism

site, but to also include the tourism experience in the image she has (or

would like to have) of herself. (140)

As armies of semioticians, we are not just reading the landscape in search of the picturesque, or reading a culture in search of the luggage label, but we are also reading about outselves, scripting narratives of who we believe we are or think we want to be.

All the information to compose these fantasies is available to us via a “visual rhetoric” that “influences the ways that we image and consequently construct tourism realities…Although tourism has always been an imaginatively charged realm, perhaps the greatest contributor to tourism fantasies in recent decades has been advertisement”

(Delfin 139). Delfin underestimates the influence of advertisements on the history of tourism, reaching back to the mid-nineteenth century because, like most theorists of tourism, she seems exclusively concerned with post-modernism or late-capitalism and fails to see, or at least, acknowledge, the continuities with the Victorian era. At the same time, there is so little scholarship or data, and very few resources, on tourist ephemera that any theoretical framework is always somewhat anachronistic.

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For tourists of the nineteenth century, one downside of self-fashioning oneself as a world traveller through conspicuously labeling one’s luggage was the inevitability of lost luggage. We tend to think of lost luggage as a malady of the present era, in which any glamour of airline travel has long since ceased, and we are left helpless and panicking under florescent lighting as the snaking conveyor belt grinds to a hault. In truth, lost luggage has been a problem for tourists since the beginning. Luggage labels developed partly as a response to this problem, but labels also became a source of problems. In an 1895 edition of The Strand Magazine, William G. FitzGerald published an exposé on ‘The Lost Property Office’80 of London railway companies:

Asked what was the most fruitful cause of the losing of luggage, one of

these officials [of the Lost Property Office] unhesitatingly replied, ‘Old

labels and wrong labels.’ The travelling Briton, it appears, loves to see his

luggage plentifully besprinkled with labels representing diverse localities.

(644)

As a consequence, porters and other transporters could not determine which labels were most recent. Adding to this problem was another practice seldomly documented: “Then there is the Margate tripper who deliberately labels his luggage, ‘Shepherd’s [sic] Hotel,

Cairo,’ in order to impress his friends” (644). The frequency with which luggage labels actually inadvertenly lead to lost luggage, rather than improving transport, made it necessary for the Railway Clearing House to employ “luggage searchers”: “whose time is

80 In the same article, FitzGerald relates a sad tale of the many babies that are found dead in the Lost Property Offices of London; one particular child, however, was found “cosily packed” with a bottle and addressed for a home in Kilburn. The residents of the address refused to acknowledge the child because no money was included in the parcel: “So the perty [sic] infant was handed over to the police, who, in turn, passed it on to the workhouse, where it was christened “Willie Euston” and lived for four years” (645). No doubt this story came to the attention of Oscar Wilde who, later the same year, wrote about the foundling John Worthing in The Importance of Being Earnest. 211

entirely taken up in travelling from one end of the country to the other in quest of missing luggage” (644).

One of the few references to tourist ephemera in travel literature is found in Vita

Sackville-West’s 1926 travel book Passenger to Teheran, in which she writes of attaching her own labels before setting of on a journey to:

An unexploited country whose very name printed on my luggage

labels seems to distil a faint, far aroma in the chill of Victoria

Station: PERSIA. It was quite unueccesary for me to have those

labels printed. They did not help the railway authorities or the

porter in the least. But I enjoyed seeing my fellow passengers

squint at the address, fellow-passengers whose destination was

Murren or Cannes, and if I put my bag in the rack myself I always

managed to let the label dangle, a little orange flag of ostentation.

(31)

Though Sackville-West used custom-printed tags, presumably attached via a string or leather strap, rather than adhesive labels, the effect is the same: it labels her just as much as it identifies her luggage. It marks her as a traveller to exotic destinations rather than fashionable seaside resorts. She is not a tourist, but an adventurer; not surprisingly,

Sackville-West’s travel writing often frames her as a solitary traveller, rarely mentioning her companions.

Throughout Passenger to Teheran, the labels sometimes cause Sackville-West anxiety, a dread of the long and strenuous journey ahead; at other times they indicate her

Englishness among Europeans. By the end of the book, they become the sought-after

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badge of honor, the evidence of where she has been: “Was I standing on the platform in

Victoria Station? I who had stood on so many platforms? The orange labels dangled in the glare of the electric lamps. PERSIA, they said, PERSIA” (155). By the time

Sackville-West made her journey, the so-called “Golden Age of Tourism” was essentially over, along with the “Golden Age of Luggage Labels,” both brought to a close by the

First World War, which ended most leisure travels for decades to come.81

Towards a Theory of Ephemera

W. J. T. Mitchell’s 1994 collection Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual

Representation is an ambitious work covering and critiquing a wide range of texts on the history of visual culture, from Wittgenstein to Foucault to John Crary. In his introduction,

Mitchell calls for a shift in how we think and theorize images:

Although we have thousands of words about pictures, we do not

yet have a satisfactory theory of them. What we do have is a

motley array of disciplines—semiotics, philosophical inquiries into

art and representation, studies in cinema and mass media,

comparative studies in the arts—all converging on the problem of

pictorial representation and visual culture. (9)

Critical theory, by its very nature, is a “motley array” of ideas drawn from disparate disciplines, schools of thought, and political persuasions; and Mitchell has devoted a

81 It was not until after World War II that tourism again saw growth. By that time, though, few of the grand hotels remained; airlines, ocean liners, and others in the tourist industry began producing posters for promotional purposes, and the labels produced at this time show a coevolution of aesthetics and graphic designs, as well as advanced printing techniques. By the 1970s, airlines had begun to develop their own, less romantic methods for labeling baggage and rough handling of luggage proved just how ephemeral these paper labels are.

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significant portion of his career contributing to the ever-growing corpus of visual theory.

I think what Mitchell means by “satisfactory” is that there is not yet a definitive or final answer to questions that he and others ask about how we create, read, and consume images.

I am unconvinced that this is a problem that must be remedied, yet the language which Mitchell uses to describe these theoretical conundrums is overwhelmingly negative. In responding to Crary’s Techniques of the Observer, Mitchell writes:

It is the realization that spectatorship (the look, the gaze, the glance, the

practices of observation, surveillance, and visual pleasure) may be as deep

a problem as various forms of reading (decipherment, decoding,

interpretation, etc.) and that visual experience or ‘visual literacy’ might

not be fully explicable on the model of textuality. Most important, it is the

realization that while the problem of pictorial representation has always

been with us, it presses inescapably now, and with unprecedented force,

on every level of culture, from the most refined philosophical speculations

to the most vulgar productions of the mass media. Traditional strategies of

containment no longer seem adequate, and the need for a global critique of

visual culture seems inescapable” (16).

If we engage in a close reading of Mitchell’s text, we might first find a few antiquated value positions, creating a dichotomy between “the most refined philosophical speculations” and “the most vulgar productions of mass media.” What Mitchell presents at the end of this passage is a threat—a danger that images must be contained, and that current theoretical models are incapable of containing that threat. Even in the need for

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new theoretical models of containment, the need itself is defined as “inescapable.” I would prefer to approach the theory of visual culture as a space of potentiality and aesthetic pleasure.

I do not pretend that this chapter has answered more questions than it has raised. I have only scratched the surface of inquiry about the roles of photography and tourist ephemera to represent places and cultures or to promote tourism; however, it is a surface that has previously garnered only cursory glances. If I have contributed anything to this

“motley array” of theories, I hope that, first and foremost, I have drawn attention to the importance of tourist ephemera which has previously been ignored in scholarship.

Second, this chapter shows the inextricable relationship between aesthetics and semiotics, and, third, I hope to have undermined a tradition of prejudice against theory as anachronistic to Victorian or Edwardian culture. Even in the discourse around art and representation where Benjamin is the most central figure, for several years now scholars, whether writing texts or speaking at conferences, have included a disclaimer which amounts to: I know Benjamin was not writing in the nineteenth century, or even about the nineteenth century, but he offers the best critique of popular visual culture we currently have.

I have read or heard many calls for a “satisfactory” theoretical model or, at the very least, a model that does not rely so heavily on Benjamin. But rather than making disclaimers for anachronistically using theorists, we should be questioning the basis on which theorists identify touristic and visual phenomena as exclusive to the twentieth or twenty-first centuries. Simulacra did not originate out of twentieth-century late-capitalist

Americana. The same systems Baudrillard and Eco describe were also operating in the

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nineteenth century. The practices of post-modern tourism, which have been criticized by

Boorstin, MacCannell, and others, are nearly identical to the practices William Combe and Ruskin criticized in nineteenth century tourists. This is because the visual culture that drives twentieth and twenty-first century tourism remains firmly rooted in eighteenth- century aesthetics.

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Coda

Post-Tourism: What Comes After?

As any dissertation or book draws to a close, there are myriad intriguing and generative questions that remain unanswered. Though the picturesque is emphasized by

Italy, how does picturesque tourism function in France or Spain? How does tourism function in India or other regions which are not, strictly speaking, picturesque? There is clearly a relationship between the picturesque gaze and the framing of colonial subjects, particularly the ways in which the non-white body is aestheticized and imagined in the texts and iconography of tourism. How is the picturesque complicit in colonialism?

Rather than simply drawing to a conclusion, this coda addresses some of the questions that have been nagging my mind for the last few years of researching and writing. Three of these questions take the form of “What comes after?” or “What happens next?”

First, what happens after tourists return home? Many tourists continued to read travel literature to relive their experiences abroad; this was James’s imagined audience when he wrote Italian Hours.82 Other tourists, such as American socialite Isabella

Stewart Gardner, kept meticulous scrapbooks filled with postcards and photographs collected during decades of travel around the world. Gardner’s scrapbooks offer a case study of the relationships between text and image, how ephemera are arranged in personal collections, and how those collections may be read by scholars. Second, since I have given an analysis of how, when, and where tourists looked for the picturesque, tracing its evolution over a period of roughly 140 years, it is only fitting that I also address questions concerning the end of the picturesque. When and why did the picturesque finally fall out of use among tourists? And, what came after the picturesque?

82 James writes, “I do not pretend to enlighten the reader: I pretend only to give a fillip to his memory” (4). 217

I will preface this by saying that there are no conclusive and definitive answers, but I will share my preliminary theories of visual culture after the picturesque. Finally, if Fussell’s chronology is true—that travel came after exploration and tourism after travel—it must also be true that another era will exist, or already exists, after tourism; therefore, we will also need theories of visual culture in the era of post-tourism.

A Case Study of the Travel Scrapbooks of Isabella Stewart Gardner

American socialite Isabella Stewart Gardner is perhaps best known today for the eponymous museum she founded in Boston just after the turn of the twentieth century; or, rather, her museum is best known as the site of the most notorious art heist in history.83

Isabella Stewart and John “Jack” Gardner were both from wealthy American families and had travelled in Europe before to their marriage in 1860, but it was not until June of 1867 that they began to travel extensively together throughout the world. In the decades that followed, the Gardners visited Egypt, Russia, Cuba, Japan, China, India, Turkey, and much of Europe, returning again and again to the Palazzo Barbaro84 in Venice, where they entertained the most prominent figures in art, literature, music, politics, and society.

During these many years, the Gardners were acquainted with the Pennells through their mutual friend, James McNeil Whistler, and had close, yet sometimes troubled,

83 Just after one o’clock in the morning on March 18, 1990, two men wearing police masks entered the museum, bound and blindfolded the security guards, and spent the next 80 minutes removing thirteen of the world’s most priceless works of art, including four drawings by Degas, a Manet, Vermeer’s The Concert, and several Rembrandts, most notably the artist’s only seascape, The Storm on the Sea of Galilea, which included his own self-portrait, staring out at the viewer. The crime has never been conclusively solved, and the works have never been recovered. In March, 2013, the FBI investigators announced that they believe they know who was responsible for the theft, but details have still not been released. While the theft has captured popular imagination, there has been considerably less written about the origins of the museum, and the woman who spent decades building one of the largest collections of European art in America. 84 The Palazzo Barbaro was owned by Daniel and Ariana Curtis, who often rented out their home to the Gardners. Both families were influential in Venetian society and filled the Grand Canal mansion with celebrities and dignitaries, many of whom became known as the “Barbaro Circle.” 218

friendships with Vernon Lee and Henry James. Gardner at the center of a social network which includes many of the key figures discussed here. Gardner is believed to have been the inspiration for several of James’s characters, most notably The Golden Bowl’s Adam

Verver who greedily buys up all the great masters of Europe to fill his own museum in

American City. Gardner even went so far as to purchase demolished buildings for their stonework and ship them back to Boston to recreate a Venetian courtyard near Fenway

Park. She also collected photographs and postcards, which she pasted into scrapbooks accompanied by handwritten excerpts from her reading, illustrating the indelible relationship between image and text.

Gardner does not always note the source of her excerpts, though some are verifiable or clearly taken from her guidebooks. Attempting to identify sources for all of the passages Gardner gives throughout twenty-five years worth of travel scrapbooks quickly becomes an elaborate textual scavenger hunt. However, there are frequent connections between the passages Gardner includes and the texts that we know or can assume that she used. Even when it is impossible to locate the exact quote, the collage effect of images and texts reveals the ways in which texts, or even fragments of texts, circulate within tourism. The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum85 in Boston,

Massachusetts holds the scrapbooks, as well as her extensive collection of guidebooks, many of which I examined, noting dog-eared pages, underlined passages, and countless checks penciled in next to starred sights.86

85 I am grateful to the staff of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum for graciously allowing me to spend a day with Gardner’s scrapbooks and calling books, answering my countless questions, and providing invaluable assistance. This would also not have been possible without the generosity of The George Washington University’s Office of Graduate Assistantships and Fellowships, who awarded me a Dissertation Summer Research Fellowship.

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The Gardners arrived in the sovereign state of Hamburg on June 10, 1867, still four years before German unification. Despite spending almost a week in the city,

Gardner apparently found little in Hamburg to arrest her attention, or at least little worthy of taking up space in her first travel scrapbook. Instead of the popular sights and tourist attractions, she includes only a purchased photograph of a “Hamburg flower girl,” according to the caption she wrote below the photo. The pages of this first scrapbook, particularly from their travels in Scandinavia, are filled with photos of peasants, showing a particularly interest in local color, dress, and customs.

The Gardners arrived in Copenhagen a few days later, on June 15, visiting the

Market Place, the Børsen (stock exchange), and “Rosenberg Palace” [sic], including the long, luminous “Throne room – Riddersal” (Album 4.1, 1).87 A few pages into the scrapbook, Gardner pasted several photos of delicate stonework, which she labels “Bas reliefs of Thorwalsden [sic]”88 (n. pag.). She also includes a passage from Hans Christian

Anderson: “We saw a swan strike the marble rock with his wing, so that it cleft asunder, and the forms of beauty, imprisoned in the stone, stepped forth into the light of day, and people of all lands lifted their heads to see these mighty forms” (5). Gardner attributes the quote to Anderson without naming its source, and I have been unable to locate the exact lines, particularly this precise translation, neither in collections of Danish fairy tales nor, as I suspect, excerpted in a guidebook. It is not surprising, of course, that Gardner would quote or reference Anderson’s fairy tales, considering how largely he figures in Danish

87 I include album numbers used by the Gardner Museum. Digital copies of most of the scrapbooks, though, unfortunately, not Gardner’s calling books, can be found online: http://www.gardnermuseum.org/microsites/travelalbums/album_index.html. 88 Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen (1770 – 1844) 220

culture. Local authors are often so closely identified with a region as to become synecdochal, as is the case with Anderson and Denmark, or Dickens and London.

Although Gardner’s source material is unknown, the same translation appears in

Katharine E. Tyler’s travelogue The Story of a Scandinavian Summer (1881), where the excerpt is attributed to Anderson’s story “Old Swan’s Nest, between the East Sea and the

North Sea” (24), which Anderson wrote partly as a tribute to Thorvaldsen. It is likely, then, that “Old Swan’s Nest,” which is also read as a loving tribute to Denmark, is closely associated with this particular collection of Thorvaldsen’s sculptures. Since

Gardner’s text precedes Tyler’s by fourteen years, it cannot be the source for Gardner’s

1867 quotation, but because they give the same passage verbatim, one can assume both women used the same source material. This text may have been popular with tourists of the period, although unidentifiable today. I like to think of these unidentifiable sources as ghost texts that have left traces in travel writing and collections of tourist ephemera.

Whatever the source, Gardener’s travel scrapbooks present a unique opportunity to examine a collection of ephemera that illustrates both the ways in which images are chosen to represent tourist experience and the ways in which text and image interact on the page.

During this first trip to Northern Europe, the Gardners used the 1864 edition of

The Knapsack Guide to Norway, which was published by John Murray and includes

“Skeleton Tours” and other features familiar to Murray’s readers. We also know that they used the 1867 Black’s Picturesque Guide to Norway, which is inscribed to Gardner’s husband, “J. L. Gardner Jr. Christiania 24 June 1867.” On the corresponding page of

Gardner’s scrapbook, she has written “Arrived in Christiana [now Oslo] Sunday June 23.

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7 P.M.” (Album 4.1, 4). Below, she includes several pictures of stave churches and a photograph of “Charles XV of Sweden and Norway,” which were unified at the time of the Gardners’ tour. There are countless other national and geographical changes which take place between Gardner’s first scrapbook in 1867 and her final scrapbook of Italy from 1892. Just as it is possible to follow the Gardners’ European travel throughout the decades, she also inadvertently records European political history.

Of all the intriguing narratives found within Gardner’s scrapbooks, what we see most often is her deep cultural engagement in art, literature, and music. In 1886, Gardner compiled a scrapbook of travels to Great Britain, France, Germany, Austria, and Italy.

The first pages of this guidebook feature drawings of Richard Wagner and Franz Liszt.

After several weeks in London and many postcards from the British Museum, the

Gardners arrived in Germany, where she pasted in another illustration of Wagner, including three small flowers from his grave, with notations: “Wagner Theatre: Six

Performances,” along with the titles and dates of each (4.13, 10). Only a few pages later,

Gardner writes, “Liszt died late Saturday night, July 31. & was buried Tuesday, August

3” (4.13, 14). Gardner was a great admirer of Liszt, and her scrapbook commemorates her mourning. She includes a photograph of Liszt taken by Nadar a few weeks before his death, another taken soon after his death (unknown photographer), and a blurry snapshot of thousands of people lining the streets and following the funeral procession. Continuing this rather morbid trend, the Gardners arrived in Vienna on September 12th, immediately visiting the graves of Mozart and Haydn. 89

89 For more information on travelling to graves or other morbid destinations, see Westover, Paul. Necromanticism: Traveling to Meet the Dead, 1750 – 1860. New York: Palgrave, 2012.

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Using Gardner’s scrapbook annotations, it is possible to map her travels around the world, detailing the exact time she arrived in each city, the name of the vessel she travelled on, the hotel where she stayed, and other facts related to her itinerary. It is very rare that scholars have the opportunity to glean so much information about how tourism was actually practiced. The Gardners first arrived in Venice on May 14, 1884, after spending a few days in customary quarantine, and checked into the Hotel Europa. She begins her Venice scrapbook with a quote:

For this race

Hath made its dwelling within sea-girt walls;

Nor is there passage found from house to house,

Save by the skiffs that bear them o’er the tide. (4.12, 2)

Gardener does not identify this passage at all, but there is strong evidence that she read this poem in Haratio Forbes Brown’s history of Venice, Life on the Lagoons. Below the poem, which Brown attributes to a Norman poet, William of Apulia, Gardner pastes an image of the Lion of St. Mark, which is identical to the frontispiece illustration from

Brown’s text. Therefore, her scrapbooks can also be examined as a record of her reading, and the ways in which she forms connections between text and place.

Sometimes there is significant historical or archival evidence for establishing connections between her travel album and a particular text. Gardner was incredibly knowledgeable about Italian art, much of which she learned from reading Ruskin.

According to Elizabeth Anne McCauley, Gardner purchased a copy of The Stones of

Venice in April 1882, making it “the first publication about [Venice] that is documented in her library,” but Gardner did not take Ruskin with her on her first trip to Venice two

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years later (7). Her travel diary, which she kept separately from her scrapbooks, echoes

Ruskin’s description of arriving in Venice: “Strange morning. The sea like oil—and boats all yellow and red sails. An idle delicious looking [sic] at it—i.e., the sails, the strange sea, and Venice far off” (qtd. in McCauley 8). McCauley cites Ruskin, as well as Percy

Shelley and Anna Jameson, as possible inspirations for her travel diary: “The sense of strangeness that Gardner observed was preconditioned by a century of descriptions that emphasized this very feeling” (8).

Gardner does not specifically cite Ruskin, and it is possible that she, like

Elizabeth Robins Pennell, was growing tired of him, particularly because a few years before her trip to Venice, Henry James introduced her to Whistler. The two became close friends, and she bought several of his paintings for her collection in Boston. Whistler painted Gardner at least once in The Little Note in Yellow and Gold, though the small pastel portrait is not nearly so famous as the paintings of Gardner by John Singer Sargent or Anders Zorn. She also kept a published copy of papers related to the Whistler-Ruskin trial, further suggesting that her sympathies were more on Whistler’s side than Ruskin’s.

Whistler and Zorn were both constant and influential members of the Gardners’ inner circle, but when it came to assembling her early travel albums of Venice, instead of paintings, she chose to include dozens of photographs by Carlo Naya.

Gardner arrived in Florence on September 29, 1884, staying at the Hotel della

Pace, now a modern, three-star hotel. Compared to the preceding pages with very few notations, she suddenly begins including multiple long quotations interspersed within page after page of artworks from the Uffizi. Next to a photograph of the statue of Venere de’Medici, she writes, “’The goddess loves in stone & fills/ The air around with beauty.’

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Byron” (4.3, 75). Other longer passages relate to the history of an artwork or the biography of the artist. On one of the last pages of this album, beneath a photograph of the Vasarian Corridor of the Uffizi, Gardner has included an excerpt of Robert

Browning’s poem “Protus”:

Among these latter busts we count by scores,

Half-emperors and quarter-emperors,

Each with his bay-leaf fillet, loose-thonged vest,

Loric and low-browed Gorgon on the breast,—

One loves a baby face, with violets there,

Violets instead of laurel in the hair,

As those were all the little locks could bear. (qtd in Gardner 4.3, 86)

Gardner’s inclusion of poetry shows the ways in which her own travels were pre-scripted and mediated by texts. Byron and Browning, or the fairy tales of Hans Christian

Anderson, inform her experiences and add to the imaginative quality of her travels and photo albums. Unlike her earlier collage-like assemblages from Northern Europe, the scrapbooks of Venice and Florence are mostly photographic reproductions of art works.

One can only wonder what Benjamin would have made of Gardner’s albums, or, indeed, what she would have made of Benjamin.

Gardner’s use of poetry suggests an imaginative play between the text and the image. At the same time, it is worth noting the source of these poems. While she was an avid reader, and probably knew Browning personally, as they were both friends with

Katherine De Kay Bronson, a prominent figure in Venetian society, every passage

Gardner quotes is taken from a single source: Augustus Hare’s travel guide Cities of

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Northern and Central Italy, Vol. III: Florence, Siena, and Other Towns of Tuscany and

Umbria (1876). Gardner never mentions Hare by name, but even extracts of historical information are taken or paraphrased from his prose. Gardner’s use of texts, and texts within texts, reveals yet another layer of mediation to her travels.

One thing I find fascinating about Gardner’s scrapbooks is that, as with her museum at Fenway Park, she took on a curatorial role. She chose which images and other ephemera (invitations, paper flags, flowers collected from celebrity graves) to include and arrange the way she liked. She decided what information to give, whether it is the factual details of her itinerary, or the romantic scraps of poetry. As source material,

Gardner’s travel albums are incredibly rich with potential for research on tourism and ephemera. Doing justice to her archive—not only her scrapbooks, but also her diaries and calling books, which are filled with signatures, messages, poems, and drawings by her famous guests—would take years and constitute several volumes. Such a study would go even further towards offering an understanding of how real tourists, outside of satires and fiction, understood, recorded, and remembered their travels. This case study has considered just one example of how a single tourist made connections between the sights she saw, the images she collected, and the texts she read.

The Post-Picturesque

By the late nineteenth-century, the lines between the origins of the picturesque, that is, Gilpin’s understanding of the rules, and the signs of the picturesque—craggy cliffs, mountain-perched ruins, rustic peasants, etc.—had been erased. Any sight that was visually apprehended and appreciated as beautiful, unique, or outside the normal scope of

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the tourist’s experience was called “picturesque.” While most scholars of visual culture hold that the picturesque was in decline decades before the advent of photography, the literature of travel proves that the picturesque continued to circulate in nineteenth and early-twentieth century tourism. New digital technologies, such as Google Ngram,90 allows scholars to visualize the frequency with which picturesque and photographic appear in publications from the period. As it turns out, the confusion that Forster points to in “The Story of Panic” persists in the publication record long after his writing and, indeed, even decades after my own preliminary theories.

The Ngram below counters the popularly held belief that the picturesque was in decline in the early nineteenth century, an argument that I believe is based partially on

Gilpin’s text passing out of vogue, and largely on the textual evidence found in books such as William Combe’s The Tour of Doctor Syntax in Search of the Picturesque and

Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, which satirize picturesque tourism. The x-axis shows the publication date, while the y-axis shows the frequency of the term (given as a percentage of total words used in all texts of the period). This Ngram charts the frequency of picturesque, shown by the blue line, and photographic, shown by the red line; these lines finally cross at approximately 1939, over a hundred years after the advent of the camera.

90 See Aiden, Erez and Jean-Baptiste Michel. Uncharted: Big Data as a Lens on Human Culture. New York: Penguin, 2013. Erez and Michel write, “Though today the Ngram Viewer might be seen as odd or exceptional, the digital lens is flourishing, much in the same way that the optical lens did centuries ago” (23). 227

Figure 25

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 texts91 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 decline in the publication data around the turn of the twentieth century when, as mentioned previously,

Henry James stops using the term, and Forster openly criticizes its misuse. It stands to reason, then, that, on one point, the body of scholarship is true: the picturesque did disappear as the photograph increased in popularity;92 but it happens much later—at least according to the publication record—than scholars anticipated.

91 By selecting specific date ranges from Ngram, users can view the most popular texts (according to Google’s search analytics) from a given period. 92 Since this happens in 1939 it could be related to the outbreak of World War II, when pastoral idealism would understandably be forgotten as war photography was published more frequently. 228

Post-Tourism

Over the past few years, theorists have raised the notion of post-tourism, which

Chris Rojek has defined as “a playful, ironic, formally individualized attitude to sight- seeing. They may even voluntarily and, of course, ironically play the part of being a mass tourist” (62). For Rojek, the post-tourist embraces all of the aspects of tourism that have traditionally caused consternation—superficiality, artificiality, commodification of cultures, etc.—and this type of tourism is certainly on the rise, fuelled by the same cultural, capitalist, and neo-liberal concerns that have recently (re)popularized hipster culture. Aided by websites such as Atlas Obscura (www.atlasobscura.com), a digital guidebook to abandoned theme parks and kitsch local museums, this type of hipster post- tourism seeks out the sights that no one else would want to see.

Other theorists have posited that post-tourists may not actually go anywhere at all.

According to George Ritzer and Allan Liska: “[T]he post-tourist finds it less and less necessary to leave home…television, videos, CD-ROM, the Internet and virtual reality…allow people to ‘gaze’ on tourist sites without leaving home’” (102). This definition of the post-tourist does not strike me as being any different from the armchair traveller, which has existed throughout history as long as there has been travel writing, or armchairs, for that matter. There have been generations of tourists who embraced their guidebooks, while anti-tourists have sought refuge in unknown places specifically because they were not listed in guidebooks; therefore, I am unconvinced that either

Rojek’s or Ritzer and Liska’s definitions of post-tourism are markedly different from what we already understand as tourism.

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I suggest that we are all post-tourists in that we readily, though perhaps unknowingly, consume sights and signs of other cultures as well as our own. We may not be intentionally and passively consuming these signs, as the armchair traveller might, but neither can we avoid them from the constant barrage of media. Post-tourism is also about being a tourist in one’s own space. By this, I do not mean visiting regional sights or supporting local museums, what is frequently called “backyard tourism;” instead, I mean that we are performing all of the functions typically associated with tourism during the course of our daily lives. Post-tourists use websites and smartphone apps, such as Yelp, as crowd-sourced, participatory guidebooks to find the best café within walking distance, for instance. When the meal arrives, post-tourists take pictures and upload their images to

Facebook and Instagram, labeled #foodporn. Later, post-tourists can leave their own reviews on Yelp, contributing editorial notes to the communally written handbook. As

Susan Sontag writes, “[E]ssentially the camera makes everyone a tourist in other people’s reality, and eventually in one’s own” (57). Since nearly everyone—or at least nearly everyone in the so-called developed world, and increasingly in the developing world— carries a camera in their pockets at all times, Sontag’s statement carries more truth than ever, perfectly defining what it means to be a post-tourist.

Afterthoughts

There are a great many topics under consideration here—tourism, aesthetics, semiotics, literature—and still a great many more have been excluded, but I hope that this work has made strides towards understanding the relationship between visual culture, as it is discussed by historians and literary critics, and the semiotic structure of tourism, as

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seen by theorists and cultural critics. Like Dr. Syntax, I have gone out in search of the picturesque in the literature and ephemera of tourism. To paraphrase Henry James, who writes, “There are a great many ways of seeing Florence” (Italian Hours 180), there are also a great many ways of sight-seeing and writing about tourist experiences. This dissertation is an examination of the representations and functions of the picturesque gaze, from its very beginnings in the late eighteenth century, until its eventual disappearance in the early twentieth century, decades after most scholars date its demise.

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Armstrong, Nancy. Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism.

Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1999.

Baedeker, Karl. Italy: Northern Italy and Corsica. Leipsic: Baedeker, 1870. Print.

------Northern Italy. Leipsic: Baedeker, 1889. Print.

------Northern Italy, including Leghorn, Florence, Ravenna and Routes through

Switzerland and Austria. 13th ed. Leipsic: Baedeker, 1906. Print.

Barthes, Roland. Camera Lucida. London: Vintage, 2000. Print.

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