'A Happy Holiday': English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870-1930 (review)

Between 1870 and 1930, millions of immigrants from the United Kingdom and continental Europe left their homelands, traveled across the Atlantic, and resettled in Canada. Although these individuals have been the subjects of numerous historical studies, they were not the only people to make a transatlantic voyage. In 'A Happy Holiday,' Cecilia Morgan examines the experiences of privileged male and female English-Canadian tourists as they too traversed the Atlantic. Yet unlike those who made this voyage in the hulks of immigration ships, these "modern tourists" traveled in modish transatlantic steamers such as the Canadian Pacific's Empress of Britain and the Allan Line's Parisian, which in 1881, transported Sir John A. Macdonald and Lady Macdonald from Quebec City to Liverpool. Other individuals including Winnipegger Mary Thomson, who traveled across the Atlantic in 1897, 1898, 1910, and 1914, as well as Montreal financier Edward Greenfield, who also made four transatlantic voyages between 1894 and 1913, recorded their experiences in private diaries. Famous suffragette and social reformer Emily Murphy published her "decidedly dyspeptic" (38) account of her travels, The Impressions of Janey Canuck Abroad, in 1902. Based upon published and unpublished documents such as these, as well as a large selection of newspapers and periodicals, Morgan examines how overseas tourism "grew in size and complexity" throughout the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, by interrogating the role that tourism played in "forging and sharpening middle-class identities and perceptions." (19)

Nine elaborate chapters chronicle the travels of these middle-class English-Canadian tourists. Each chapter not only underlines the nuances of modern tourism, but also reveals the contradictory and ambivalent reactions these travellers had to the sights, sounds, and subjectivities they witnessed and participated in abroad. The first and last chapters examine the major transportation changes that affected the tourist industry in these years. In chapter one Morgan meticulously details the steamship passages to Europe that reaffirmed for these modern tourists their "class position and privilege," (33) while chapter nine investigates how the introduction of the automobile in the 1920s transformed travels through the United Kingdom and the European continent. Together these chapters demonstrate the "centrality of modernity to transatlantic tourism." (33) The bulk of the chapters follow the very itineraries once used by these modern, transatlantic, English-Canadian tourists. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 explore the spaces, places, and historical landscapes of Scotland, England, and Ireland that garnered the attention of these tourists, while chapters 5 and 6 take the reader onto London's busy streets and omnibuses, into parliament and drawing rooms, and on tours of palaces and poorhouses. In chapters 7 and 8, Morgan turns her attention to the "other" side of the English Channel where she found that although these tourists seldom went east of Germany or north to Scandinavia, they sought out in France, Switzerland, Germany, Belgium, and Italy important lessons about history, religion, and culture. Such sites of tourism did not only indulge these tourists' desires to analyze and classify Europeans, but, as Morgan argues, they also satisfied their desires for sensory and emotional stimulation. Yet for all that this elite group of tourists saw, smelled, and scribbled about in their diaries, it appears that like other tourists in this period they very rarely understood, or at least not explicitly in their writings, their holiday experiences through specifically white or colonial eyes.

Cecilia Morgan firmly situates 'A Happy Holiday' within an expanding international body of historical literature on tourism, colonialism, and modernity. In fact, Morgan's work shares much with Angela Woollacott's To Try Her Fortune in London, an examination of white Australian and New Zealand women who made similar excursions "home" not as tourists, but to seek education or employment. Morgan argues that unlike the women in Woollacott's study who were well aware of, and expressed concern about, London's sexual and physical dangers, Canadian women rarely voiced much concern for their vulnerability in England's public spaces. Morgan insightfully employs the work of Tina Loo...