Baedeker’s Southern Italy

One of my favourite things to do of a weekend is browse the shelves of secondhand bookshops and I’ve been on a bit of a roll with old travel books in Leamington’s Oxfam Books & Music in recent weeks, which I’ll be blogging in the next few posts.

The first of my finds is a 1912 edition of a Baedeker’s handbook to Southern Italy and Sicily

Full title: Southern Italy and Sicily, with Excursions to Sardinia, Malta, and Corfu; Handbook for Travellers, with 34 Maps and 34 Plans, Sixteenth Revised Edition.

Baedeker’s handbooks, along with Murray’s Guides, were the key tourist handbooks of the 19th century, accompanying many a tourist on their travels across the continent and beyond. Although the “guidebook” had long been used to advice travellers about their journeys, the Handbook was a slightly different genre, designed as a compact edition to be carried by the traveller on their journey. The Handbook included practical information to prepare the traveller, but also set out a planned series of routes to be followed.

This is the first edition that I’ve seen up close, and it’s fascinating to see just how detailed the guide is as well as to read the surrounding material; between the two, there’s a clear tension between being a “true” independent traveller as opposed to a mere “tourist” (I am of course drawing here on James Buzard’s discussion in The Beaten Track¹). The Preface informs the traveller that the aim of the Handbook is to “supply the traveller wtih some information regarding the culture, art and character of the people he is about to visit” in order to “render him as independent as possible of the services of guides and valets-de-place”.

But whilst the emphasis here is on a certain mode of “independence”, the heavily prescriped form of the Handbook is also hinted at: it is “in every way to aid him in deriving enjoyment and instruction from his tour”. The Handbook’s purpose is not just to set out the correct path to follow, but to aid the traveller in deriving the correct enjoyment from each sight – to give the traveller the lens through which to view all that he sees. As Buzard writes, handbooks “preceded the tourist, making the crooked straight and the rough places plain for the tourist’s hesitant footsteps; they accompanied the tourist on the path they had beaten, directing gazes and prompting responses” (75); Dickens’s depiction of tourists in Italy in Little Dorrit satirises the tourist’s reliance on the handbook, describing masses of tourists “walking about St. Peter’s and the Vatican on somebody else’s cork legs, and straining every visible object through somebody else’s sieve” (428).

Thus what follows are routes detailing exactly where to walk, what to look at, and even the timings of each stage: “from the piazza in front of the cathedral we proceed to the S. straight through a gateway, then ascend through the porch of the church of Sant’Antonio, pass the portal of the church of Santa Chiara to the left, and reach (8 min.) a door giving on the road.” This level of detail constitutes most of the book’s 500 pages, such that there almost seems little point to actually visiting the place itself!

The same can be said of the cultural attitudes of the English towards foreigners displayed throughout. The particular strength of feeling against Italians is demonstrated right from the start: the first paragraph of the Preface ends by stating “the Handbook will also, it is hoped, save the traveller many a trial of temper; for probably nowhere in Europe is the patience more severely taxed than in some parts of Italy.” In the section giving practical advice, stereotypes of Italians abound: it is noted that begging “has in Italy been regarded from time immemorial as a legitimate mode of earning one’s daily bread”, reference is made to the “insolence and rapacity” of cab-drivers, and we are warned that “the popular idea of cleanliness in Southern Italy is behind the age, dirt being perhaps neutralized in the opinion of the natives by the brilliancy of their climate”. The travellers’ health is of great importance, with strict instructions on what to eat and drink (avoid “free indulgence” in most foods) and what to wear when: “always be provided with a greatcoat or shawl …. Woollen underclothing is indispensable.” No detail is left out, even the traveller’s body incorporated into the institutionalisation of travel.

This edition has certainly seen a few travels in the last 100 years, although it’s in good condition and the colour maps and plans (as above) are still vibrant (and notably, all details in Italian). The next book I’ll be blogging about is slightly different in focus and purpose, recounting a visit to Morocco in the 1920s.

¹James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature and the Ways to Culture, 1800-1918. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

Celebrating Dickens, 1 month on

It’s just over a month since Dickens’s 200th birthday and in that time the Celebrating Dickens app has had over 10,000 downloads!

I spoke about the app and the Celebrating Dickens project this afternoon on BBC West Midlands, available to listen again online (1hr 43mins in).

Dickens’s World, 7th–8th March 2012

This week I “attended” Dickens’s World, a free online conference at which I was an invited discussant. The conference was a fascinating event, with both the quality and quantity of papers exceeding my expectations – keynote video addresses, papers and special virtual issues of existing Dickens scholarship presented a wealth of information for Dickens scholars and enthusiasts across the world. Such was the volume of material that I’ve only watched the keynotes and read a selection of the main papers and articles, whilst the special issues will have to wait until I’m back to research time. A few things particularly took my interest, and I thought I’d draw together my comments and thoughts here.

The conference opened with a keynote address “Beginning the World” from Professor John Bowen, exploring travel in Dickens’s life and works. Bowen began by giving a sense of the “world” in which Dickens moved, discussing Dickens’s own interest in and experience of travel, before focusing on a novel in which the idea of “the world” is a central concern, Bleak House. Bowen highlighted the recurrence of the phrase “in the world” throughout the novel, a matter of some interest in a novel which aims to present a complete world in its expansive vision of society. Bowen suggested that the very idea of “the world” is an uncertain concept, further emphasised through repeated references to “the earth” as perhaps a more physical locating of the abstract idea. This provided an interesting perspective to my work on the novel, and I hadn’t realised just how many uses of the phrase “in the world” occur in the text. As I suggested in the comments, the sense of ambivalence around the idea of “the world” is further underscored by the restricted physical “world” within which Bleak House operates, simultaneously entertaining the idea of “the world” whilst withdrawing into the nation. Bowen’s discussion of Esther’s “beginning the world” at the end of the text further iterates this: the final “world”, the second Bleak House, is firmly situated within the heart of England at the northernmost location of the novel.

Bowen also drew out the global literary resonances of Dickens’s writing, something explored more fully in John O. Jordan’s paper “Global Dickens“. Jordan provides an expansive overview of the circulation and critical reception of Dickens’s works across the world, an ambitious and fascinating piece of work full of many interesting suggestions for further reading.

On the subject of global circulation and mobility, I also enjoyed reading Glen O’Hara’s paper on the ‘Networked World’ of the 19th – early 20th Centuries in the first Special Issue. O’Hara’s discussion of networks focused on the telegraph, advocating a note of caution as to how we read nineteenth-century technological development and the global connectedness enabled by such technologies – in the age of the internet we’re too quick to assume that developments were as fluid as they might seem. As with the development of transport networks of the period, the telegraph displayed uneven patterns of development and intensified national tensions. As other papers hinted at, such developments occur within a complex field of meanings and reading the Victorian “response” is never simple, often fraught with ambivalence and anxiety.

I’m looking forward to discovering more from this conference, and reflecting more on the format of the online conference; one thing I noticed with this is that you really do create a very individual conference experience and I’m sure interpretations and perspectives differ a lot as a result, so I’ll be interested to hear what others thought and to read all the comments on the conference papers. This was a timely stimulus for me, though, as I’ll be getting back into lots more travel research and blogging over the coming weeks.

Dickens’s World Online Conference

Dickens’s World is an online conference that will be taking place over the next couple of days, starting at 8am on 7th March. I am an invited discussant for the event, which will involve commenting on papers, video addresses, and the reading room resources.

The program looks very interesting – I’m particularly looking forward to John Jordan’s “Global Dickens” and Prof David Paroissien’s keynote address on “Shifting Perspectives in Dickens’s Fiction”.

If you haven’t registered there’s still time to join the 500 delegates! This is my first online conference so it’ll be an interesting experience, and I’ll blog again after the event.