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Total Immersion: Navigating the Thames 117 numerous stage and television adaptations (including a BBC television version by Tom Stoppard). It is a primary source for Connie Willis’s 1997 Hugo Award–­winning science fiction novel, To Say Nothing of the Dog. But perhaps its most emblematic contemporary incarnation takes the form of a Google Earth tour, available on the web, that allows you to recreate Jerome’s precise journey through satellite photography: just click onto the path, sit back, and watch the river landscape unroll beneath you. 5. Back to the Future: News from Nowhere The Internet is full of websites that function as virtual museums, preserving the experience of sites and places that have long since vanished. Virtual tours of the Acropolis (http://www.acropolis360.com/) or the now-inaccessible Cave of Lascaux (http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/lascaux/en/) allow visitors not only to see specific aspects of these sites but to have the sensation of moving through them, giving a more vivid sense of reality to the experience. While these virtual tours sometimes involve video clips and at other times are merely comprehensive maps with pictures, the visitor’s ability to click on different portions of the site and linger at the places that interest him or her most creates a sense of individual interaction with the environment. Similarly, the leisurely, contemplative pace and sense of continuousness that characterized traditional river travel, combined with an awareness of the historical significance of the Thames itself and of the many important sites through which it passes, fostered a sense that travel on the Thames was a kind of virtual travel into the past. Herendeen notes that “in topographical literature—­ from the writing of Genesis, to the classical and medieval descriptions of the world, through the Renaissance—­ the river offers simultaneously a return in time and to nature: to the fons et origo where mind and matter, logos and numen were unseparated” (125). Schama also describes the classical association between rivers and a sense of return to a primeval past, in which “the ultimate origin was represented as a fountainhead” (267). The Thames is often portrayed in these guidebooks and narratives as a generically pastoral and traditional setting that is best experienced through old-­ fashioned modes of transport. In fact, the necessarily slow-­paced and somewhat archaic means of travel required by the river journey is a large part of its charm. 118 Are We There Yet? It has been noted that contemporary ecotourists follow a long tradition of travellers who deliberately “eschew the technologies heralded by industrialization,” and that “since the European nature tours of the Romantic period, the history of modern Western travel has been marked by a nostalgic investment in objects and activities that might be used to recreate experiences from a bygone era” (Gilbert, “Belated Journeys,” 260). In the Victorian period we see that as the railroads stretched further into the countryside and superseded river and canal travel as a convenient means of public transportation between major towns, the earlier mode of transportation continued to be valued not just in spite of, but because of, its obsolescence. Yet many Thames narratives begin on the railway before moving to the river , evincing a structure that is also apparent in twentieth-­ century ecotourism, according to Gilbert: the preference for progressively more primitive forms of travel on a single trip. In this layering of multiple travel experiences, the“movement through specific spaces is transformed into a journey back in time through a mutually constitutive process: decreasing mechanical complexity in the modes of transport signals an increasing temporal distance from contemporary urban life in the Western world, a process which, in turn, casts specific destinations as belonging to the past” (Gilbert, 258). In the nineteenth-­ century texts, the framing of the river excursion by an introductory railway journey has the effect of highlighting the contrast between pastoral simplicity and the cutting-­ edge technology represented by the railway, which in turn reinforces a sense that the sights seen along the Thames are not just spatially removed but also temporally distant from modern London. In many of these narratives, progression up the river is linked with regression in historical time, as the traveller becomes gradually more immersed in the past. The river is seen as providing a form of access to specific moments in history through its display of the scenes at which significant events took place. Many of the guidebooks and narratives pause to expound on the historic events...

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