Human beings were crossing borders, and spending money while doing so, for thousands of years before the notion of a “tourism industry” came along. We travelled as migrants, merchants, pilgrims, invading armies, and, occasionally at first, as pleasure-seekers. Etymologically speaking, the first “tourists” appeared in Europe in the second half of the 18th century.
The word was first used to describe wealthy young men on “Grand Tours” of the Continent, extended expeditions that were considered essential preparation for life in the highest echelons of society. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that those kinds of experiences started to become available to anyone outside the upper classes. The word “tourism” made its first appearance in the written record in 1811, and the next hundred years would see the small but growing population of tourists, mainly originating in Europe and North America, begin to define what the term could mean.
Things got off to a quick start. The rapid spread of steamships and railroads in the first half of the nineteenth century made it easier and cheaper for people to traverse long distances, while popular travel accounts spread the word about these wonderful new ways to see the world. In 1841, an enterprising British missionary named Thomas Cook began charging his fellow teetotalers one shilling per head for local journeys by rail. Over the next two decades, Cook expanded to weekslong group excursions to France, Switzerland, Italy, Egypt, the United States, and beyond – an innovation that would later earn him the nickname “the father of modern tourism.” Tourism was growing on the other side of the Atlantic, too, as early-19th-century hotels sprang up in the Catskills, the White Mountains, and Niagara Falls, attracting wealthy city dwellers in search of a brief taste of the sublime in nature. New beach resorts from Maine to New Jersey transformed the United States’ northeastern coastline into a summertime playground.
Would-be American tourists were looking farther afield, too, thanks in part to the writings of Mark Twain, whose popular and irreverent dispatches from Hawai‘i, Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa helped propel the Midwestern writer to fame years before he published anything about Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn. The Innocents Abroad, which appeared in 1869, was Twain’s account of the five-month group trip that took him from Paris to Damascus, from St. Peter’s Basilica to the Pyramids of Giza.
“It would be well if such an excursion could be gotten up every year and the system regularly inaugurated,” Twain wrote in the book’s conclusion, then explained his reasoning, in what would become one of his most famous lines: “Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry and narrow-mindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts,” he wrote. “Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things can not be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one’s lifetime.” Thee book, whose alternate title was The New Pilgrims’ Progress, sold seventy thousand copies in the year it was published. It would go on to become Twain’s bestselling work during his lifetime.
But it didn’t take long for tourists to begin attracting derision from within their own well-to-do ranks. Fyodor Dostoevsky, travelling in Western Europe in 1862, bemoaned the “self-satisfied and perfectly mechanical curiosity of British tourists . . . who look more into their guidebooks than at the sights.” EM Forster’s A Room with a View, published in 1908, satirised the well-to-do English tourists in Florence who looked down on the somewhat less privileged tourists who travelled by way of Thomas Cook – a man whose name and eponymous business had by that point become synonymous with package tours. (“I knew he was trying it on,” fumes one Englishman, complaining of a perceived slight from an Italian carriage driver. “He is treating us as if we were a party of Cook’s tourists.”) Even Twain, an outright supporter of the tourist enterprise, recognised the comedy inherent in the tourist’s earnest desire to travel, at one point calling himself and his companions “a pack of blockheads . . . galloping about the world, and looking wise, and imagining we are finding out a good deal about it!”
But gallop about they did. A hundred years after its etymological birth, tourism was still the domain of the rich – though it was no longer the exclusive domain of the super rich – and it was beginning to take on some of the structures and attitudes whose echoes we can still see today. But tourism before the world wars was still something of an oddball activity – a quixotic quest for those “new pilgrims” who could a"ord it. No one was talking about tourism as “an industry,” at least not yet. But that would change soon.
Excerpted with permission from The New Tourist: Waking Up to the Power and Perils of Travel, Paide McClanahan, Scriber.
