“One day in spring I here did bring my old boneshaker bicycle”: visitors’ books, inns and technologies of travel in the late-Victorian Home Counties

Abstract

ABSTRACT By exploring the visitors’ book as an artefact of diverse uses and discursive practices, this article demonstrates how it served as a site for communication amongst distinctive sub-sets of travellers; at the same time, its intrinsic flexibility was exemplified by ways it figured in public dialogues. Using the book of the Griffin Inn in Amersham, Buckinghamshire as a case study, the article explores the variety of users and uses associated with one volume and traces the book’s emplacement within both exclusive, deeply encoded exchanges between particular inscribers and readers, and much wider audiences beyond the hostelry’s walls.