1.3 The Origins of Tourism: The Grand Tour
Centuries before Burke, Humboldt, and Darwin helped revolutionize our understanding of nature and the earth, the roots of tourism had begun to take hold in 16th-century Britain. Reserved for aristocrats with the income and leisure time to travel for years on end, the Grand Tour served as a coming-of-age rite of passage. As scholar Sarah Goldsmith (2020) explains:
The Tour, which dates back to the Elizabethan era, had its roots in a long tradition of travel as a means of male formation…. Its participants were young elite men in their late teens and early twenties, often travelling after school, home tutoring or university but before the responsibilities of adult life. As this was the most expensive, time-consuming and socially exclusive of the early modern options of educational travel, a Grand Tourist was typically the family heir. (Introduction, para. 2)
The majority of research into the Grand Tour centers on British outbound travel, but French, Germans, and Russians also participated in the Tour. At the Tour’s peak in the mid-1700s, one scholar surmises, 15,000 to 20,000 British took part annually (Page & Connell, 2020). The Grand Tour embodied educational travel, and Burke’s writings informed the Grand Tour’s emphasis on and appreciation of sublime vistas as having an enriching impact on the viewer’s mental development and emotional depth. The cosmopolitan focus of the Grand Tour was complemented by hikes through treacherous landscapes and wild environs that developed the tourist’s agility and stamina.
Individuals on the Grand Tour often traveled with scholars or artists who would educate them about the antiquities, art, architecture, gardens, and natural curiosities they visited. Initially, as Goldsmith (2020) notes, “the Tour was understood as a finishing school of masculinity, a coming-of-age process, and an important rite of passage that was intended to form young men in their adult masculine identities by endowing them with the skills and virtues most highly prized by the elite” (p. 2). The Grand Tour introduced future leaders to the world and prepared them to become an intellectual force, well-versed in foreign cultures and with a cosmopolitan bent, honed from traveling to cities including Rome, Naples, Paris, Hanover, Berlin, Geneva, and Prague. Grand Tourists were introduced to the politics, trade, economics, agriculture, manufacturing, and leading industries of the countries to which they traveled.
The Tour was intended to form young men into curious adventurers with a clear understanding of other cultures and economic powers. Tourists were trained to be intrepid, intelligent, educated, polite, and virile intellectual explorers. They climbed the Alps and ventured up Mount Vesuvius, honing their physical stamina. Being able to face and handle danger proved an essential part of the rite of passage just as much as learning how to behave in a polite, educated, and elegant manner. The Grand Tour was intended to develop a young man’s strength, refinement, adaptability, as well as his knowledge of the classics and antiquity, literature, the arts, and the military; some tourists even volunteered to fight in military campaigns to test themselves in battle. The Grand Tour likewise served as a means of introducing young men to European elites, enabling them to forge connections and social networks for future use.
According to Goldsmith (2020), in addition to “instilling knowledge, the Grand Tour was also used to form men’s virtues, character, identities and even their emotional capacity. For example, it was deliberately designed to separate young men from their families and homes. This resulted in a set of anticipated emotional reactions and can therefore be termed an ‘emotional practice’” (p. 11). During the height of the Grand Tour at the mid-18th century, travelers developed a tendency toward what American Thorstein Veblen would eventually term conspicuous consumption (Theory of the Leisure Class, 1899/1934). The ostentatious display of the leisure time needed to take a Grand Tour was increasingly coupled with lavish purchasing sprees and decadent meals.
As Westerners began to shift their attitude toward nature and to understand it as a key to comprehending humanity’s place in the world, the perception of oceans and seawater shifted as well. As far back as the 17th century, when Scarborough was developed as the first spa in Britain, wealthy travelers began to visit seaside resorts. Visiting the seashore provided urban dwellers a respite from the city, and spas began to develop to serve these visitors, who were often directed by doctors to bathe in sea water and to drink mineral water, which were believed to promote physical health. With the publication of Samuel Johnson’s A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland (1775) and James Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides with Samuel Johnson (1785) less well-heeled English tourists began to seek adventure closer to home. Spurred by Johnson’s and Boswell’s travel accounts, poets, artists, musicians, and academics journeyed to the western isles and the Hebrides in Scotland. The Industrial Revolution of late 18th– and 19th-centuries, which began in Britain and spread throughout Europe and the New Republic, created enough wealth and leisure time among the middle classes that they were able to join the upper classes at seaside resorts and to follow in Johnson’s and Boswell’s footsteps. The rise of industrialism also created enough pollution to encourage those with sufficient income to visit the seashore for cleaner air, especially during the heat of summer.
Between 1695 and 1841 the population of England and Wales skyrocketed from 5 million to 14.9 million. Formerly small towns became huge industrial centers. Coal smoke filled the air and workers lived in squalid conditions. Garbage filled the streets along with sewage. Public sewers were not introduced until after 1850, so the crush of people living in squalor bred illness as waste water moved through the streams and rivers where people sourced their drinking water. At the time, bad health was believed to be caused by putrid air, known as miasma. Not surprisingly, many British workers fled the slums of England to make their way across the Atlantic. Industrialism also brought more money into the pockets of workers, who began to travel to the seashore in increasing numbers in order to escape crowded cities. Railroads began to run from urban centers to the shoreline, transporting increasing numbers to seaside retreats.
In order to capitalize on train passengers, Thomas Cook launched his first travel excursion in 1841. He hired a train, sold 570 tickets, and led his first tour to a temperance retreat, where his clients heard a series of lectures on the demon alcohol. Trains were so novel at this point, that people lined the tracks to watch Cook’s train pass by. The next year, Cook led his first tour to Scotland, almost six decades after Johnson and Boswell inspired individuals to journey through the Scottish isles. In 1842, Scotland had not yet developed the infrastructure needed for comfortable group travels. As a result, Cook’s passengers had to maneuver a series of carriages, trains, and steamships on their journey. The ship that took the passengers from England to Scotland lacked enough cabins, so many tourists found themselves forced to sleep in deck chairs. Despite the fiasco, Cook learned quickly and found workarounds so that within a few years his Scottish tours had earned him a solid reputation. In 1860, Cook took 50,000 tourists to Scotland, many of them women, for whom Cook served as chaperone (Zuelow, 2016).
