The beaten track

The Beaten Track is a major study of European Tourism during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It draws on a wide variety of sources from high literature and travel writing to periodicals and guidebooks to reveal an important current in the history of the modern concept of 'culture', in both popular and elite forms. James Buzard demonstrates that a view of Continental tourism as open to virtually all classes came to dominate the British and American travelling imagination in this period - a process encouraged by the activities of travel popularizers like Thomas Cook, John Murray III, and the Baedekers. One consequence was a powerful distinction between the 'true traveller' and the 'mere tourist'. The influence of this opposition on nineteenth-century culture - and on the emerging idea of culture - is traced by Buzard in the writings of many authors, including Wordsworth, Dickens, Frances Trollope, Ruskin, Anna Jameson, Henry James, and E.M. Forster, as well as in periodicals from Punch to Blackwood's Magazine. 'Authentic culture' was to be found in the secret precincts off tourism's beaten track, where it could be discovered only by the sensitive traveller, not the vulgar tourist. This elegantly written study engages with debates in cultural studies concerning the ideology of leisure. For Buzard, tourism's apparent combination of both popular accessibility and exclusivity allows it to stand as an especially revealing instance of modern cultural practice.

Beyond its central premise, the book can be read through the connected lenses of Fiction, Nonfiction. Those themes offer useful points of attention as the characters, ideas, or world develop, especially where the book complicates the expectations of its primary category.