| In
2007, the Royal Society of Edinburgh awarded a Caledonian
Research Fellowship for the investigation of tourist handbooks
to Italy and Germany. The work, focussed on the
John Murray Archive, is being undertaken at the National
Library of Scotland by RSE Visiting Fellow Barbara Schaff
of the University of Göttingen.
Following the Napoleonic
Wars, Continental Europe was open as never before for
business to British tourists and travellers. New commercial
infrastructures, changing modes of transport, and networks
of communication soon developed that were to have enormous
diplomatic, commercial, and cultural consequences. Key
to understanding these historic developments is the
importance of print culture in the creation of an ‘imagined
community' of the British abroad. Possibly the most
important factor in this process was the development
of guide books for English-speaking travellers in this
period, the most influential of which was the series
of ‘Handbooks for Travellers' initiated by John Murray
III (1808-1892) in 1836.
John Murray
introduced a genre which brought about a significant
shift in travel writing. For one thing, the handbooks
tended to replace the traditional perspective of the
single author-traveller with a self-avowedly objective
view that came through a new kind of collaborative authorship.
Unlike previous
travel narratives, Murray's series represented a truly
collaborative venture, each title being designed as
a continuous work in progress written not only by commissioned
authors but also compiled from numerous notes and letters
from their respective readers. Keeping a keen
eye on the market, Murray ensured that they were always
up-to-date by keeping them unbound in sheets until they
were required, binding them on demand, thereby allowing
the Murray Advertiser and the endpapers, containing
other titles of the series, to be updated for every
issue.
In terms of
their contents, as well as their places of composition,
production, and distribution, these handbooks were truly
books across borders. Distributed abroad in numerous
cities, Murray handbooks, with their familiar red covers,
could be purchased by British tourists in bookshops
in every major tourist destination.
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