Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 ed. by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 ed. by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison Christopher M. Keirstead (bio) Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900, edited by Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison; pp. xiv + 343. Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, $54.99, $54.99 paper, $39.99 ebook. Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900 opens with an epigraph from the famous blind traveler James Holman's A Voyage Round the World (1835), where he reflects on the fading ritual of the Grand Tour, once "a matter of serious importance," which the increasing ease and ubiquity of travel had rendered "somewhat ludicrous" (Holman qtd. in Colbert and Morrison 1). Like many travel writers traversing this familiar ground, Holman felt compelled to reinvent his subject, something for which his lack of sight may have proved an advantage: "undistracted by recollections of visual objects," he wrote, he could draw more abundantly on his other senses (Holman qtd. in Colbert and Morrison 2). Much like Holman did for his contemporaries, Benjamin Colbert and Lucy Morrison's present edited volume reimagines the Victorian encounter with Europe. The collection brings new critical and investigative tools to bear on a familiar subject, including increased focus on the body and its senses, beyond sight, in shaping travel experience. Chloe Chard, for instance, examines the popularity of picnicking near the ancient ruins of Pompeii, where consuming simple fare amidst its uncannily preserved domestic spaces offered an especially resonant "way of shifting historical time into the ambit of personal time" (78). Other chapters reflect new attention in travel studies to the multilayered nature of travel writing authorship and the complex editorial interventions that often preceded publication. In terms of scope, the book widens our understanding of the Victorian map of Europe to the north and the east, while also taking up some understudied destinations and subgenres of travel writing along the more beaten path of Western Europe. Continental Tourism is bookended by two chapters examining the means and pace of modern travel and its impact on the body. Morrison's chapter on the brief but notable craze for roller coaster travel in, of all places, post-Napoleonic Paris, serves as a reminder to Victorianists that well before the arrival of the railroad, efforts were already underway to craft a new kind of "consumerist experience of travel-as-motion and travel-as-feeling" (17). As its name indicates, the Montagnes Russes was itself a cultural import from Russia (exchanging sleds and ice for carts and rails) and would become a major international attraction, featured, for instance, in Thomas Moore's The Fudge Family in Paris (1818). (Moore's text, along with other examples of early century travel satire, is the focus of a separate chapter by Colbert.) Hitting the brakes, as it were, after some half century of rail travel in Europe, Robert Louis Stevenson's Travels with a Donkey in the Cévennes (1879) models what we would now call slow travel: favoring travel means that allow one to dwell longer and connect more closely with the people and places one encounters along the route. Stevenson's destination was also about as far off the grid as one could get at the time in Western Europe, as chapter author Jennifer Hayward stresses. The region's "isolated, difficult terrain, saturated with a powerful mythology" appealed to the Scottish author, as did its history of religious dissent, which forms the focus of much of the book's second half, to which Hayward devotes some overdue scholarly attention (270). Two other contributions to the volume exemplify how much the idea of the travel author has become enriched by closer attention to the intertextual nature of much travel [End Page 317] writing. Kevin J. James focuses on the complex afterlife of inn albums, whose content, especially if from a famous location such as the Grande Chartreuse, was often reproduced in travel journals, poems, and other separate works. The Chartreuse album, known to include verse by such British luminaries as Thomas Gray, was reputed to have been stolen by French soldiers under Napoleon, giving it a further nostalgic charge in...