Review by Ed Quillen
Tourism – June 1997 – Colorado Central Magazine
Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours – A History of Leisure Travel, 1750-1915
by Lynne Withey
Published in 1997 by William Morrow & Co.
ISBN 1854105485
It is no accident that the words travel and travail are close relatives. Until recent times, they meant the same thing — an ordeal. In ancient times, the occasional king or trader may have ventured abroad because it was pleasant or interesting, but for the rest of humanity then, travel was generally the result of some calamity like famine, drought, flood, or an invasion.
But the Industrial Revolution, which occurred first in 18th-century Great Britain, produced two major changes:
1. A goodly number of people with the finances and time — that is, a leisured class — to indulge in travel, and
2. Faster and more comfortable ways to get from hither to yon — starting with better roads for smoother carriage rides, and proceeding through canals to steamships and railroads.
To those two factors, add the once-fashionable British idea that a knowledge of Latin and all things Roman were essential to a gentleman.
Thus the origin of the “Grand Tour” — a trip to the continent, focusing on Rome, to complete a moneyed young man’s education. And that, Lynne Withey explains, was the beginning of tourism, at least in its modern sense — see the sights and expand one’s knowledge while traveling in as much comfort as possible.
Where the upper crust ventures in search of novelty, the rest of society often follows, as soon as resources permit. And thus, today’s common complaint (“Utopiaville was a real neat place to visit until the crowds discovered it and ruined it.”) is nothing new: “As early as the 1790s, visitors [to the Lake District of England] bemoaned the presence of other tourists, concerned that their numbers would put an end to the region’s quiet seclusion — the very quality that made it appealing.”
England’s Lake District also “appeared to many visitors as the perfect example of the Rousseauean ideal of virtuous simplicity, with quaint villages and charmingly unlettered people. That these qualities were badges of poverty did not seem to occur to most tourists.”
But after the visitor flow swelled, inspired by popular guidebooks, “tourists became more interested in manufactured amusement than in the scenery itself.” A barge hauled tourists across one lake and carried six cannon, discharged at appropriate places to produce echoes off the hillsides.
Such transformations in the Lake District seem familiar to any resident of Central Colorado, and Grand Tours recounts some ways that places become tourist destinations.
Our notions of what is “scenic,” for instance, often come from writers and artists. Mountains and wilderness weren’t always perceived as places of beauty.
“Before the middle of the eighteenth century, few people found beauty in wilderness settings; land untouched by the hand of man seemed forbidding and even sometimes dangerous.” But painters could transform it, and poets and writers like Lord Byron and Sir Walter Scott could make it the scene of romance and adventure, thus inspiring visitors to a fictional landscape.
Thus the “Alps became an experience to be savored rather than dreaded,” and tourists developed a “propensity to use literary works as guidebooks.”
A similar process continues today in this country — consider the “Ponderosa” attraction near Virginia City, Nev. People watched “Bonanza” on TV years ago, then went to Nevada and asked where they could find the Ponderosa — so many people asked that an entrepreneur built a Ponderosa just to satisfy them. Rather than “build it and they will come,” it’s “if they’re coming, we’d better build it.”
Much of Grand Tours concerns the growth of organized tourism, primarily from Europe, as a growing middle class had the means, although not always much time, to travel. The idea was to get good prices while moving quickly.
The “Cook’s Tour” originated in 1841 with Thomas Cook, a temperance preacher and cabinetmaker, who discovered that British railroads would give group discounts on passenger fares. He became the world’s first real travel agent, and the firm thrives to this day.
Of more interest hereabouts is the story of tourism in Switzerland, where alpine towns adopted different strategies.
St. Moritz went after the upper crust. In the 1850s it “was a sleepy little village lacking a single hotel. Within forty years, enterprising local businessmen transformed it into one of the most fashionable resorts in the Alps.”
Accommodations were improved, chefs supervised the cuisine, and footpaths and hiking trails were constructed. But this was not for the masses, because St. Moritz remained forty miles from the railroad. “Becoming accessible to the world, yet not too accessible, allowed St. Moritz hotelkeepers to adopt a deliberate policy of catering to wealthy visitors who came for the season.”
In the middle of the 19th century, mountain-climbing became a popular sport among Britain’s university students and graduates, and Switzerland had an abundance of mountains. Zermatt, at the foot of the Matterhorn, went after their trade, which continued to grow despite newspaper criticism of mountaineering as “a dangerous and self-indulgent sport.”
But Zermatt and St. Moritz drew visitors only in the summer — how to extend the tourist season?
Nordic skiing (cross-country skiing) had been around for millennia in Scandinavia, but it never caught on in the Alps until skis with strong front and rear bindings appeared about a century ago, thus giving the skier some control on steep slopes.
The railroad reached Gstaad in 1905, and “businessmen focused on attracting a winter clientele by establishing a ski club, developing bobsled and luge runs, and publishing brochures on the attractions of Gstaad in the winter.” Within a decade, “Gstaad was well established as a popular Alpine winter resort.”
In the American West, tourism was largely developed by outside, rather than local, forces. The primary movers were the railroads, eager to increase their passenger business. And what better way than a tourist attraction along the line?
So railroads lobbied Congress for national parks, which they then promoted: Grand Canyon, reached via the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé; Glacier, along the Great Northern; Yosemite, in Southern Pacific territory; Zion, on a Union Pacific route; Yellowstone on Northern Pacific trains; even Mesa Verde, accessible via the Denver & Rio Grande’s “Narrow Gauge Circle.”
Grand Tours ends its accounts in 1915, before the automobile became a real factor, and so it offers little in the way of current trends in tourism.
But it really doesn’t need to, either, since so little is truly new.
By some reckonings, travel and tourism form the largest industry in the world. They’re certainly major players in the economy and culture of Central Colorado, and Grand Tours explains much about how all this evolved.
Withey’s prose is flowing and clear, so you can read this for pleasure as well as information. It’s not a polemic — if she’s biased one way or another concerning tourism, I couldn’t detect it. She tells the story of the emergence of an important industry, and tells it well. It’s good reading for anybody, and should be required reading for anyone who’s curious about the origins and development of modern tourism.
— Ed Quillen