Continental Tourism, Travel Writing, and the Consumption of Culture, 1814–1900

Benjamin Colbert is a Reader in English Literature at the University of Wolverhampton and Co-Editor of European Romantic Review. He is the author of Shelley's Eye: Travel Writing and Aesthetic Vision and has edited a number of essay collections and scholarly editions of travel writing. He founded and maintains the online open-access database, Women's Travel Writing, 1780–1840. 

Lucy Morrison is a Professor of English and Director of the University Honors Program at the University of Nebraska at Omaha. Co-author of A Mary Shelley Encyclopedia, she has published articles on authors ranging from John Keats to Charlotte Brontë as well as editing essay collections and scholarly editions of post-Napoleonic travel narratives. She is currently Co-Editor of European Romantic Review.

This book explores the boundaries of British continental travel and tourism in the nineteenth century, stretching from Norway to Bulgaria, from visitors’ albums to missionary efforts, from juvenilia to joint authorship. The essay topics invoke new aesthetics of travel as consumption, travel as satire, and of the developing culture of tourism. Chronologically arranged, the book charts the growth and permutations of this new consumerist ideology of travel driven by the desires of both men and women: the insatiable appetite for new accounts of old routes as well as appropriation of the new; interart reproductions of description and illustration; and wider cultural manifestations of tourism within popular entertainment and domestic settings. Continental tourism provides multiple perspectives with wide-ranging coverage of cultural phenomena increasingly incorporated into and affected by the nineteenth-century continental tour. The essays suggest the coextension of travel alongside experiential boundaries and reveal the emergence of a consumerist attitude toward travel that persists in the present day.