Reisen und leben, Heft 22 / 1991

Werner K. Elias:

Outstanding Travel Guides of the 19th Century

Tourism as a popular pastime among the rising European middle classes developed after the Napoleonic Wars, and in response to it the modern travel guide was created. It appeared in its classic form during the second half of the 1800s and remained an indispensible companion of the tourist until about the middle of the 1900s. Since then, guided tours as well as freely available travel literature have rendered our guide less of a necessity than it used to be.

The classic guide had to meet certain requirements to fulfill its function. In addition to geographic and historic data of the territory, the guide was expected to provide detailed descriptions of the sights and to supply information on available accommodations, eating places, transportation, museums, monetary details as well as the financial aspects of the journey. All this had to be presented in a systematic manner based on a uniformly applied order so that the reader would locate the desired data at a minimum of time. Moreover, the guide had to be compact and portable; therefore, the text had to be concise and printed legibly on a light weight paper in a size not larger than duodecimo. Finally, from a practical and economic point it was desirable to publish guides in a series of volumes in the same format, confining the individual tour to one country or region. This met the travellers' needs, and at the same time provided an excellent merchandising tool in that the author's success with one volume sold the others.

The first writer to grasp this concept in its entirety was H.A.O. Reichard, an official in one of the many German dukedoms. He lived from 1751-1828. A great traveller and avid reader of travel literature, he began his own writing in 1785 with a guide to Europe. It did not sell well at all, but his second book, "The Traveller in Germany and Switzerland, with trips to Paris and St. Petersburg", published in 1801, was an immediate success. It went trough nineteen editions, and many officers carried the French translation with them trough the Russian Campaign. Reichard wrote guides for Italy, France, the Lowlands and other countries, most of them translated into French and English and many running through a number of editions well into the 1830s. Individual country volumes were published in the same book size; but the text structure was not as yet standardized. Early editions were accompanied by only one or two maps, acquired from other publishers; later on some town plans were added.

The next leading author of guides for international tourists was an Englishman, John Murray. To be exact, John Murray III (1808-1892). The son of a publishing family involved in travel literature, he became acquainted with Reichard's work and in 1836 brought out his first handbook "Holland, Belgium and North Germany". It was followed by many other guides which, for many years, remained the most popular ones with British travellers. His volume on "Switzerland" went trough eighteen editions. Murray was the first to arrange the contents of his guides in a clear and systematic order. Data for each city appeared in the same sequence throughout, with careful attention to available lodgings. In the later editions, Murray's guides were the first to furnish good regional maps and town plans; from very beginning the maps used had Murray's own imprint. He also introduced a system of asterisks to evaluate the importance of sights and - later on - of hotels. New editions were put into print as soon as accumulated new data warranted it. But his guides appeared only in English.

From 1851 on, Murray also authored handbooks for the regions in the British Isles. Here he had to compete with two well established authors: Leigh and Black, and his renown in the domestic field never matched that of the foreign guides. Some competition to the latter was provided by Thomas Cook & Son, the famous travel organization, which, in 1861, began to issue its own handbooks to foreign countries. They were backed by Cook's Tours und were slanted towards the guided tour market. France's contribution to the 19th century travel guide literature was Adolphe Laurent Joanne (1813-1881). He began publishing in 1841 with handbooks for the various regions of his country; soon he added good guides for Germany; Switzerland, Italy, Egypt und Greece. His volumes are remarkable for their beautiful steel engravings and for the maps designed by Auguste Henri Dufour. Guided by some previous authors, Joanne placed the Information concerning hotels, restaurants, transportation and similar data in the back of his guides, arranged alphabetically by town. His son Paul (1847-1927) continued his work. It was eventually carried on by their publishers, Hachette, under the name "Les Guides Bleus" with the help of various authors.

We now come to the author whose name became, in many countries, synonymous with the travel guide: Baedeker. Like Murray, Karl Baedeker (1801-1859) had been in the publishing Business. He published his first handbooks - Holland and Belgium - in 1839, followed by Germany and Austria (in one volume) in 1842. Baedeker acknowledged his indebtedness to Murray in the early volumes; he had been in regular correspondence with him ever since he consulted him in connection with the revision of another author's guide to a Rhine Journey in 1835. But he improved the presentation in the handbooks. Special attention was paid to places of lodging which Baedeker would not list unless the Inn was known to him personally or recommended by a tourist known to him as reliable. He gave his special consideration to the description of art and architecture, engaging well known art historians for these sections. His guides to Egypt became famous for the essays in them by Ebers and Steindorff, leading Egyptologists of their day. From the Start, his volumes were furnished with numerous maps of good quality, printed to order; when his competitors - Meyers Reisehandbuecher - included coloured city plans in their guides, Baedeker copied the idea at once.

French editions of the Baedekers had begun to appear from 1846 on. Karl's son Ernst (1833-1861) received his training in England and remained in touch with John Murray through his entire life; he took over after his father's death. In 1861 he introduced the first English versions of the handbooks, a most successful venture. The Baedeker publishing house is still in existence although no family members have been connected with the firm since 1987, and the format of the guides has been adapted to modern needs. Over the years, countless travel guides have been shaped in the image of the "Baedeker", even if this was done only by binding volumes in the same red cloth with gold lettering. Many authors acknowledged their obligation in the preface to their handbooks, as did, e.g. the Americans Appleton and Osgood. Many others did not.

Werner K. Elias: Outstanding Travel Guides of the 19th Century
In "Reisen und leben" Heft 22, S. 3-5.
(Holzminden: Ursula Hinrichsen; 1991)
ISSN 0936-627X


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Reproduced by kind permission of Alex W. Hinrichsen. All copyrights acknowledged.

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