Writing the Journey: June 1999

"Class and Tourism in the 1820s: The American Tourist Guidebook"

---

Richard H. Gassan
University of Massachusetts
gassan@history.umass.edu

The tourist guidebooks produced in the first decade of their publication in America, 1820-1830, were printed for a newly wealthy upper middle class. These guidebooks sent travellers on long voyages, and were intended to guide these newly moneyed classes to the haunts previously reserved for the aristocracy. However, not only were they mere route guides. In addition to their travel function, they also had, encoded in their text, another function: to create within the reader a sense of gentility. Not only did this take the form of instilling a romantic sentiment (and the guidebooks were quite explicit as to where one should feel what), but they also took an educational stance. With each stop, one would be stepped along a kind of Byronic journey, and, in the end, would emerge enlightened, wiser, and closer to being a kind of natural aristocracy.

In 1822, Saratoga-based Gideon Davison, probably working from European models, created the first true tourist guidebook. His A Fashionable Tour changed the language and format of travel writing from either highly personal accounts or the capsule-type descriptions used in city guides. With his guide (and note that anyone who was truly "fashionable" would not need a guidebook), a traveller was directed to Saratoga, one of the haunts of the uppermost classes, and then, after a suitably long stay, to Niagara, the nexus of romantic sentiment in America. Along the way, the traveller was directed to observe certain places and things, and Davison embellished them with 'romantick' stories, designed to create a sensibility and an atmosphere.

For three years, Davison's book was the sole example of its type produced in the United States. But in 1825, two competing works were produced. Timothy Dwight's The Northern Traveller and Henry Gilpin's A Northern Tour offered competing visions for tourists, with Dwight offering a high-toned, educational experience, while Gilpin, although still didactic, moved in a more Byronic way. Each of these three competing works offered a vision of gentility and refinement, and, through their texts, were each in their own way self-help books for an upwardly mobile class.

Working from the collection of the American Antiquarian Society and from archival sources from the New York State Library, this paper provides a survey of the first years of what would become a ubiquitous object in America: the tourist guidebook.

---

Richard H. Gassan
University of Massachusetts
gassan@history.umass.edu

---

RETURN TO CONFERENCE SPEAKERS, TITLES AND PROGRAM

Updated May 23, 1999