The visitors’ book in historical context: introduction

Abstract

It is customary to begin introductions such as these with remarks underscoring the relative newness of research in the field. Thatmay be the case here, though the argument in favour of this collection is as much that it brings together scholars who have beenworking on discrete projects centred on a specific source set – one whose value has often primarily been understood in terms of the nominal information it yields about travel markets. Broadly speaking, the contributions in this issue explore the visitors’ books’ relationship to other texts, contemporaneous and historical, manuscript and print; their role in record-linkage; and their communicative functions amongst a range of users. All articles underscore that these sources have real research value; by asserting their value as forms of travel writing in particular, the authors argue in favour of materials that might otherwise be regarded with the same curiosity and dismissiveness that attended evaluations of the sources in the nineteenth century. Initial interest in the books for the systematic exploration of the geographic compass of the client market has given way, as this issue attests, to examinations of these sources as literary and cultural artefacts. The books tell us a great deal about technologies of transport, as several contributions to this issue underline, but also of the book itself as a technology – as an instrument for organising and communicating data, and not merely narrowly-defined nominal data. Perhaps themost obvious comment tomakeon these sources is that their survival is largely serendipitous: the articles that follow explore visitors’ books held in local museums, private establishments, libraries, county archives and other record repositories. Others were privately acquired and are held outside public archives and institutions. Perhaps more than anything this has nourished assessments of their ephemeral character – a stance which, until the embrace of ephemera as the basis for serious scholarly inquiry, left them to languish with the other “fragmentary documents of everyday life”, to borrowMaurice Rickard’s terminology (2000). Adding to their ambiguous status as James andNorthey note in this volume, and as all contributions here underline, is the diversity of material structures that the “visitors’ book” encompassed, to say nothing of related nomenclature, from French “livres d’or”, “registres des arrivées” and “livres des étrangers” to German “Fremdenbücher” and many other similar variations. Serving in places as an album, elsewhere as a register, often as both at once, the artefact is difficult to define, and its genealogies remain largely apocryphal. To understand the evolution of the visitors’ book’s value as an historical source, it is important to recognise how it was configured within meta-narratives that explicated