The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to 'Culture' 1800-1918 by James Buzard (review)

Reviews77 Victorian values. Of course this appreciation did not extend to the values of Marxism, though she nonetheless recognized and remarked (like Foucault, whom it was not however her habit to invoke) that it too was a Victorian ideology. Does this make her post-modern as well? CHRISTOPHER KENT University of Saskatchewan James Buzard. The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to 'Culture' 1800-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. xii + 357. $35 CDN. Tourism is a complex cultural phenomenon, partly because it is so thoroughly dependent upon the manipulation of images. The concept of the "tourist" itself is far from clear, and it is partly the search for an understanding of this obviously key term which prompts those who write about tourism to begin by establishing their own meanings of the word. Following Jonathan Culler's lead, James Buzard argues that it is time to move beyond the value-laden image of the tourist as one whose experience is necessarily superficial and unauthentic, and to give up the notion that there is a true dichotomy between the tourist and the traveller. While this convenient idea has allowed us to believe, as. Evelyn Waugh once said, that "The tourist is the other fellow," to continue seeing the problem in this light, as Paul Fussell and others have done, involves the perpetuation of a not very helpful stereotype. The originality of Buzard's approach lies in his vision of the tourist as a "mythic figure" and his determination to evade the tourist/traveller debate by treating the development of modern tourism and the antitouristic impulse to single oneself out as a "traveller" as part of the same cultural process. His master trope, as he says, is "the beaten track," which is the place where tourists (not travellers) are supposed to be found: "a region in which all experience is predictable and repetitive, all culture and objects merely 'touristy' self-parodies" (4). Buzard's goal, as he describes it, is to "historicize" the concept of the tourist, the better to understand how this concept has worked, and continues to work, in our culture. The Beaten Track concentrates, for the most part, on the experience of British travellers on the Continent after 1815. Much of its analysis of the developing tourist industry is drawn from other monographs dealing with the history of the railway, 78Victorian Review of Thomas Cook's excursion business, and of other major institutions, but the author examines in far greater depth the literary culture of nineteenth-century tourism, in keeping with his belief that it is literary analysis which "fundamentally engages and tests cultural representations" (13). While certain authors predominate, such as Wordsworth, Byron, Frances Trollope, Henry James, and E.M. Forster (the last two are the subject of separate chapters of their own), a variety of travel writings, novels, poetry, and guidebooks all come under scrutiny. Buzard quotes too abundantly at times, and his quotations sometimes fail to illustrate his points, but a sophisticated, wide-ranging, and challenging discussion emerges from his examination of how antitourism became the expression of an adversary culture well-contained by the dominant values of the age. And Victorian values are very much on display in the literature of tourism. Inspired by Dean MacCannell's suggestion that tourism may offer a key to an ethnography of modernity, Buzard pays close attention to the relationship between tourism and industrialization, and between tourism and democracy. Even though most workers had neither the time nor the money for extended vacations, the question of class arose often enough; Wordsworth, for example, expressed concern over the possibility that the humbler classes might be tempted to visit places which they were incapable, through lack of education, of appreciating. But fear of the crowd, as an element of anti-tourism, did not focus mainly on the working-class, but on the vulgarity of many middle-class tourists, far to many of whom, it was thought, were invading and infesting the Continent, streaming along the beaten path, attempting to acquire, with minimal effort, some cultural capital along the way. Throughout this work, Buzard emphasizes the vital legacy of Romanticism (or of Romantic literature, at least) in Victorian Britain and also...