Forster's Trespasses: Tourism and Cultural Politics

Abstract

I have always respected guide books-particularly early Baedekers and Murrays. So wrote E. M. Forster in a late edition of his own guide to Alexandria; but it may be that his respect was in manner of one's esteem for a loyal opponent.' For Forster could look back on a career marked by considerable critical engagement with phenomenon of tourism, vast and complex set of institutions and practices for which Baedeker and Murray had long been familiar symbols. The inevitable mark of tourist, guidebook had, by Forster's time, already come to stigmatize its bearer in contrast to all that was indigenous, authentic, and spontaneous. In 1869 Leslie Stephen sounded an already familiar note when he vented his wrath in Cornhill Magazine against the ordinary tourist [who] has no judgment, [who] admires what infallible Murray orders him to admire ... [and who] never diverges one hair's breadth from beaten track of his predecessors. . 2 The passivity that so irritated Stephen was encouraged by guidebooks' practice, since 1830s, of arranging descriptive and practical information along numbered 'routes' that extended from one large town to another; readers were offered structured freedom of choosing their own itineraries from within range of choices covered by Baedeker and Murray, who could presumably be trusted as to which was beaten track and which nooks and corners.3 The books also