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Writing the Journey: June 1999

NOW, NOW, VOYAGER: Measured Counsel in the Classic Baedeker Handbooks


Ira Grushow
Franklin and Marshall College
I_Grushow@ACAD.FANDM.EDU

The travel handbooks originated by Karl Baedeker in 1832 have passed into legend, providing not only a model for similar publications, but leaving their name as a synonym for a comprehensive guide of almost any sort. Organized initially by coach and railway routes, crammed with practical information about hotels, inns, restaurants, and mercantile establishments, provided with suggested itineraries and graded recommendations of tourist attractions, replete with museum floor plans, maps and town plans still useful today, as well as essays on history, language, and art, the Baedeker guides, particularly those published at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century are artifacts of an age of travel that has long since passed. As such, they may now be examined for the cultural assumptions embedded in their seemingly neutral tips to travelers and their interpretations of unfamiliar customs and usages.

I propose by a comparative examination of passages from a number of editions of these guides, with a concentration on those issued immediately prior to World War I, to elucidate some of these assumptions in at least three categories: first, and most obvious, what attitudes are implied in travel to relatively unfamiliar tourist areas, such as the eastern provinces of Austria-Hungary, Russia, the Near East, and North America; second, whether any alterations in expectations can be perceived over time due to events such as acts of political terrorism, international tensions at the beginning of this century, the Balkan Wars, etc. ; and third, whether in the treatment of the subject matter of the same areas there exists a reasonable equivalence among the editions in English, French, and German.

The outcome of this investigation, frankly somewhat old-fashioned and belletristic, will of necessity be less than definitive, but the task will be rendered considerably less formidable by the existence of excellent bibliographies cataloguing all the editions of Baedeker's published and by recourse to my personal collection of these guides.


Department of English
Franklin & Marshall College
Lancaster, PA 17604
I_Grushow@ACAD.FANDM.EDU

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Updated May 23, 1999