Thomas Cook, Holy Land Pilgrims, and the Dawn of the Modern Tourist Industry

Abstract

During a visit to Palestine in 1853, A P. Stanley, then canon of Canterbury, sent missives to friends as he went along, describing his reactions to the Holy Land. Goldwin Smith, a fellow at University College Oxford, enthused, ‘You have nothing to do but to piece together your letters, cut off their heads and tails, and the book is done.’ Sinai and Palestine (1856) became his most popular work. When the Prince of Wales decided to visit Palestine in 1862 he asked the canon to accompany him: Stanley had been Regius Professor of Ecclesiastical History at the University of Oxford in the late 1850s, and he was the nephew of a peer. Although his position in the social order excelled that of many other Eastern travellers at mid-century, Stanley serves well to evoke the kind of encounters between religiously-minded Britons and the Holy Land which were experienced in the era before modern tourism.