Presenting Canada to the Scientific Gaze: The Handbook for the Dominion of Canada and the Eccentricity of Science Tourism

In 1884, the Handbook for the Dominion of Canada was produced by the Montreal organizing committee for the first-ever meeting of the British Association for the Advancement of Science to be held outside of the British Isles. At first glance, the Handbook resembles present-day tourist guides in that it separates the country into sections, provides historical and natural historical descriptions for each, and identifies major sights. Yet its style blends scientific and bureaucratic diction, it is almost completely shorn of affective qualities, it contains few illustrations but an excess of statistical and scientific information, and it proposes what would seem to us to be erratic itineraries through places such as mines, mental asylums, factories, or waterworks. This article uses the Handbook to think about tourist handbooks as forms of middlebrow mediation of touristic experience that draw heavily on the emergence of bureaucratic and scientific diction to establish their cultural authority. It questions conventional constructions of nineteenth-century Canadian tourism in terms of the Romantic desire for the untamed, the exotic, and the sublime. Furthermore, it suggests that the Handbook was written in hopes of enrolling the visiting British scientists into a larger project of encouraging British immigration to Canada.