The Englishman's England: Taste, Travel and the Rise of Tourism

by Ian Ousby

This fascinating and original study shows that the English tourist industry is not a peculiarly modern creation. Concentrating on four types of perennial tourist attraction - literary shrines, country houses, picturesque ruins, and the natural landscape - Ian Ousby identifies the canons of taste that made them objects of fashionable attention in the eighteenth-century, and records how they acquired the trappings of the full-blown tourist attraction. He traces the development not just of an industry but of a state of mind - marked from its earliest days by the haunting fear that tourism spoils and maybe even destroys the very things it most admires. The Englishman's England is highly illustrated throughout.

Genres: Nonfiction

258 pages, Hardcover

First published April 12, 1990

About the author

I an Ousby's life began - and ended - in tragedy. The birth was tragic, or at least bleak, because his army officer father had been stabbed to death in the India of 1947, independence year, while his mother was pregnant with him. The death was tragic, or at least deeply sad, because his industry, insight, versatility, critical and literary skills, which had created a considerable reputation for him as a writer in diverse fields, have been cut off by cancer at the relatively early age of 54.
Ousby never seemed a very contemporary figure and eschewed fashion and fashions of all kinds. Mannered and slightly languid - but not eccentric - in speech and dress, he was an essentially shy man who was able, through the clarity of his thought and the manner of his expression, to get trenchantly to the heart of the matter, somewhat like a 19th-century essayist but without a hint of the dilettante. As writer, scholar and broadcaster, his contributions ranged through several genres: the study of detective fiction, travel, literature and modern French history among them. His readers were far flung: his book on the American novel was translated into Russian, on detectives in fiction into Japanese.
Born in Marlborough, Wiltshire, he had a reputation as a rebel at school, Bishop's Stortford College. A young and liberal headmaster was not quite liberal enough for Ousby, and he fulminated in the school magazine, of which he was editor, against the public schools as "the last institutions in which changes in national attitude, thought or social pattern are reflected". An active member of CND from his early teens, he would go on the Easter marches, and proselytised in the provinces for the newly published Private Eye.
Yet all this was misleading. Pitchforked into American student unrest at the end of the 1960s when he went to Harvard for his doctorate, he found the radicalism unpleasant and the time-wasting unacceptable. Writing from Cambridge, Massachusetts, in 1972, he observed: "Mercifully, political consciousness seems to have diminished, so they [the students] won't be going on strike all the time."
The author of several books on early tourism and of Blue Guides to Literary Britain and Ireland (1985), England (1989) and Burgundy (1992), he had most recently been working on a major study, The Road to Verdun: France, Nationalism and the First World War, news of which has been greeted with excited anticipation in the world of books, and which will be published early next year. As a young man Ousby had quoted Martin Luther King approvingly: "You can never get rid of a problem as long as you hide the problem." In private life, like many or most of us, he probably failed to live up to that; in his writing, he triumphantly exemplified its message.

Biography source:http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2001/a...

Reviews

[Nicki Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

On the whole, I found The Englishman's England to be an entertaining and interesting read. In it, Ousby considers the history of tourism through the growing 18th century desire to visit places of literary connection and natural beauty, along with the ever-increasing trend of touring country houses. This work is an intriguing social study and I particularly enjoyed Ousby's inclusion of snippets from contemporary accounts of some of the places still visited today. I imagine that this book will appeal both to the seasoned traveller and those interested in 18th century social history.

I received this book as a free eBook ARC via NetGalley.

[Debbie · Rating 4 out of 5]

"The Englishman's England" looked at what sites and objects drew the interest of the eighteenth century tourist. The author looked at traveler's letters, diaries, journals, and guide books to see what sites they visited and what they thought about them. He often quoted from these sources. If one tourist talked about a place, others soon came to visit until it turned into a tourist trap. Locals sold mementos, guides demanded fees, stations were marked out for ideal viewing of a scene, or cannons, singing, or instruments were used to heighten the traveler's experience.

The author looked at the literary shrines they visited (graves or monuments to an author, the places the author wrote about, their birth places, etc.), their opinions about various fancy country houses (and the fees and attitudes of those allowing or guiding these tours), the draw of ruins like Stonehenge or of old abbeys and cathedrals, and places in the Peak District and Lake District that drew people for the caves, crags, and views. He talked about changing tastes reflected in how they viewed various sites and what they criticized.

These sites were usually under private ownership at the time, so what the owners did with the sites provoked discussion about how far a site (like a ruin) should be preserved in its present state or developed to accommodate tourists. Overall, I'd recommend this interesting book.

I received an ebook review copy of this book from the publisher through NetGalley.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book concerns the tourism of England and focuses on four main areas. These are literary shrines, especially that of the Romantics, such as Wordsworth; country houses, such as Strawberry Hill; ancient monuments, such as Stonehenge and the natural landscape and how man had his affect on this in good ways and bad.
I did enjoy this book but felt that in some cases it was a bit long winded and dare I say boring. Overall though I did find myself looking at the countryside in a different way.
I was given this book by NetGalley and the publisher. This is my voluntary review.