passing scenery and the prospect of adventures to come. Who knows (to borrow a line from an E. M. Forster novel) but that you might be transfigured by Italy? It had happened to the Goths.

Nearly a century has passed since Forster sent Miss Lucy Honeychurch and her spinster cousin, Charlotte Bartlett, on their memorable trip to Italy, the trip that makes up the first half of A Room with a View. We now have many more travel guides to choose from, as well as faster modes of transportation and more stringent methods of identification (passports are most definitely required). But Baedeker is still in print, and the boat train still running, and in essence Forster’s tourists are still familiar to anyone who has ever taken guidebook in hand and set off for foreign shores.

What is surprising, in fact, is how little tourism has changed over the past hundred years, once it made the leap from a privileged activity to a mass pursuit. Dean MacCannell, in his classic study of tourism, suggests a neat sociological evolution of travel: “What begins as the proper activity of the hero (Alexander the Great) develops into the goal of a socially organized group (the Crusaders), into the mark of status of an entire social class (the Grand Tour of the British ‘gentleman’), eventually becoming universal experience (the tourist)” (The Tourist, p. 5; MacCannell’s emphasis; see “For Further Reading”). That final transition came to pass in the nineteenth century, thanks to a number of factors conducive to middle-class travel. It was a time of relative peace and overall economic prosperity in England and the Continent. Advances in transportation—railways and steamers—brought cities and continents closer together, and the consolidation of Britain’s imperial power made exotic locations like India, Egypt, and South Africa more accessible to English speakers, while fiction and nonfiction set in those regions brought them into the English imagination. Novels championed the near abroad as well: As early as 1806, Lady Morgan’s immensely popular romance The Wild Irish Girl advertised the attractions of Ireland (cultural, geological, and female), while Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley (1814) and other writings romanticized the Scottish highlands and the valor of its people. As the century wore on, many best-selling writers published accounts of their own travels: Charles Dickens went to Italy (he carried Murray’s guidebook); the indefatigable Anthony Trollope went to Australia and New Zealand, among numerous other countries. Back home, the Great Exhibition of 1851, with displays representing countries from Russia to the West Indies, attracted some 6 million visitors to London and filled their heads with visions of what lay beyond England’s shores, while Charles Darwin’s voyages demonstrated the potential scientific value of geographical exploration. Progress was a watch-word of the Victorian era, and travel, both foreign and domestic, seemed to go hand in hand with it.

But perhaps a more subtle factor contributing to the rise of mass tourism was the growing sense of individual liberty and agency among England’s non-aristocratic classes. Three successive Reform Acts, beginning in 1832, extended the franchise so that by 1884 most workingmen and agricultural laborers had gained the right to vote. (The women’s vote would follow in 1918.) The Reform Acts also allowed for more fairly apportioned parliamentary representation, while other legislation supported education for children and began to institute factory reform, improving workplace conditions and approving measures for the protection of workers. With all these advances came an increasing sense of empowerment among the non-aristocratic classes, and consequently a heightened sense of opportunity for further advancement. The Grand Tour had been an institution among aristocrats, in which men and women of privilege traveled through Europe as if it were a finishing school, absorbing its art, culture, and languages at their leisure, the better to enrich themselves and English society on their return. Why should the professional classes, and someday maybe even working-class men and women, not engage in this pursuit as well?

Engage in it they did, coming in droves from England and from America. Here is Mark Twain chronicling the Anglo-American zeitgeist in the summer of 1867 as he prepares for a pleasure cruise scheduled to hit all the hot spots in Europe and the Mediterranean:

During that memorable month I basked in the happiness of being for once in my life drifting with the tide of a great popular movement. Everybody was going to Europe—I, too, was going to Europe. Everybody was going to the famous Paris Exposition—I, too, was going to the Paris Exposition. The steamship lines were carrying Americans