‘A Happy Holiday’: English Canadians and Transatlantic Tourism, 1870–1930 (review)

Cecilia Morgan’s study of transatlantic tourism during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is an important addition to tourism history and Canadian cultural history. The author gives coherence to her study by focusing exclusively on English Canadians abroad – the population that regarded English Canada as the norm of Canadian nationhood and whose travels were motivated not only by a longing for pleasure, adventure, and education, but also by a desire to explore and confirm their national and imperial identities. Far from presenting English Canadians as a homogeneous group, Morgan emphasizes their differences as much as their similarities – differences based upon region, gender, social class, ethnicity, religion, and political outlook. She shows how these tourists, too, were curious about how they differed from one another, as they commented, for example, on the distinctions of class on board ship and on the ethnic backgrounds of their fellow passengers. Some wrote for publication in newspapers or book-length travelogues, while others recorded their impressions in diaries and letters home, and in so doing, says Morgan, they revealed ‘more sophisticated and nuanced ways of conducting themselves’ than she had originally anticipated (13).

‘A Happy Holiday’ is also a study of modernity as experienced and acted out by English Canadians. Many tourists were aware that ‘travel was a performed art,’ which involved a set repertoire of self-conscious practices. One commented, for example, on the ‘thoroughly modern cultural ritual of the dockside farewell’ (33), and others found ways to describe how the speed of travel and communication suddenly altered their sense of space and time. As had tourists throughout the nineteenth century, they also had to come to terms with the fact that their arrival at a place of cultural pilgrimage, such as Robert Burns’s cottage or the home of Shakespeare, might be heartbreakingly marred by the changes already wrought by tourists like themselves.

The most popular destination for English Canadians was Great Britain. In travelling to England, many sought to understand the meaning of Englishness, and, most particularly, to discover more about what it meant for them, as citizens of a white dominion, to be both Canadians and Britons. This quest was often distinctly gendered; Morgan shows, for example, how groups of women travelling together might see themselves, and hope to be seen, as living ties between the new world and the old, the very embodiment of ‘white British womanhood’ (113). Understandably, tourists bristled at stereotypes of the colonial and were disappointed to find a good deal more evidence of America’s cultural influence in London than of their own. Throughout England, tourists flocked to see the monuments and landscapes that would bring the past to life (especially the ancient, medieval, and Tudor past), but they also took great interest in the changes that modernity had wrought and enjoyed the delights of shopping and theatre-going.

Morgan shows clearly that tourists displayed many of the same motives in travelling to Scotland, but that the romance of the past – still powerfully dominated by Sir Walter Scott’s imagery – was complicated by the fraught historical relationship between English imperialism and Scottish nationalism. While they tended not to confront this conflict directly, what they saw and learned could not be ‘easily settled or assimilated into triumphalist narratives of progress’ (77). To an even greater extent, tourists in Ireland generally avoided looking closely at the colonial relationship with England and enjoyed the spectacular landscapes instead. As part of that landscape, Irish poverty and the plight of tenant farmers were much commented upon, but understandings of Irish history were highly selective, and visitors did not seek out the homes of Irish cultural figures and political heroes as they did in England and Scotland.

Morgan emphasizes that the touristic habit of using travel to confirm stereotypes of those deemed to be ‘the other,’ such as the rural Irish, the Jews of East End London, or various continental nationalities, was anything but...