“I’ll Picturesque It Everywhere”: The Market Revolution, Print Culture, and the Commodification of Travel in America

In his 1869 travel book The Innocents Abroad, Mark Twain chronicled an all-expense-paid journey through Europe and the Holy Land aboard The Quaker City, a steamship carrying American travelers on this pleasure excursion. With his usual wit and satire, he offered commentary not only on the Old World sights his narrator visited but also on his fellow passengers aboard the ship. He sketched out portraits of the various types of tourists represented there, including “The Old Travelers,” who “‘prate, and drivel and lie. . . . They open their throttle-valves, and how they do brag, and sneer, and swell, and blaspheme the sacred name of Truth! Their central idea . . . is to subjugate you, keep you down, make you feel insignificant and humble in the blaze of their cosmopolitan glory!’” (pp.147–48). Twain mocked the ambitions and pretensions of the “excursionists,” highlighting the superficial nature of tourism and the banality, condescension, and exaggeration that seemed to define the emerging American character of the tourist.

The rise of the commodification of travel and the emergence of “the tourist” are the subjects of William B. Macintosh’s Selling the Sights. He takes the “very definition of tourism itself” as a central question of the book (p. 12). He seeks to situate the rise of the tourist in the early republic alongside the growth of a market economy and the consequent commodification of leisure experiences, which ultimately fueled the derisive attitudes toward tourists in popular culture. He places the origins of tourism within the larger framework of changes in print culture and geographic knowledge, the transportation revolution, and the spread of the capitalist marketplace to illustrate how the experience of travel was transformed in the first decades of the nineteenth century. “Tracing the tourist’s emergence as a distinct cultural figure,” he argues, “shows how deeply the emerging national market economy impacted the cultural structures of nineteenth-century American life” (p. 5). He showcases how the terms “traveler” and “tourist” began to diverge in the 1820s as leisure journeys became accessible to more Americans who had increasing access to geographical knowledge, improved transportation routes, and destinations promoted to attract them.

Macintosh draws on a wide array of sources, including letters, diaries, published travel accounts, guidebooks, social commentary, fiction, and advertisements to trace the rise of commodified leisure travel experiences. Indeed, he is at his best when providing close textual analysis of the variety of guidebooks and gazetteers that led American tourists along their far-flung adventures. He explores the changes in American geographical knowledge and writing that emerged as a result of the shifts in print culture taking place in the early nineteenth century. The early production of geographic texts in America sought to literally situate the new United States within the framework of global geography. Jedidiah Morse’s 1793 The American Universal Geography provided Americans with encyclopedic coverage of world geographic knowledge. Macintosh builds on Susan Schulten’s analysis in The Geographical Imagination in America, 1880–1950 (2001) of early American cartography as a vehicle for shaping national identity by creating what she calls “a common territorial and topographic basis for nationhood” (p. 19).

Macintosh also chronicles how the desire to develop a national community of citizens well-versed in geographical knowledge fairly quickly gave way to the creation of guidebooks designed to drive growth in visits to specific local attractions. Where early geographical text authors like Morse dedicated themselves to painstakingly collecting and presenting geographical knowledge for the common good, new guidebook producers focused more on regional economic boosterism. Propelled by the ability to print material more cheaply and circulate it more broadly, these boosters saw geographic guidebooks and gazetteers as vehicles for promoting the strengths and aesthetic charms of their attractions to stimulate both local investment and increased tourism.

Central to this pivot in the production and distribution of geographic texts, argues Macintosh, was the commercialization and industrialization...