Abstract
Thomas Cook, the nineteenth-century founder of the global travel agency, Thomas Cook & Son, is often celebrated as a pioneer of the modern package tour, an entrepreneur who contributed to the rationalization and democratization of travel by coordinating transport, food, and lodging before the era of nationalized railways or chain motels. Yet, as the quotation above illustrates, Cook also viewed himself as a cultural ambassador between Britain and the world, and between Britain’s past and its future. Working for “the cause of social and intellectual progress,” Cook’s excursions not only helped ordinary Britons become cosmopolites by introducing them to their continental “neighbours,” but they helped “the masses” discard the vulgar leisure attractions of a bygone era for more “elevating” pursuits such as trips to scenic sites, country estates, and art galleries.
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Notes
Thomas Cook, “Excursions! Excursions!” The Excursionist, June 9, 1870, 7–8.
This analysis draws on the insights of Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994); and Tony Bennett, “Cultural studies: The Foucault Effect,” in Culture, A Reformer’s Science, 74–77.
Peter Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: Routledge & Keegan, 1978), 56–57.
Ibid., 64. See also Peter Bailey, Popular Culture and Performance in the Victorian City, 19; Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, “Prologue” in Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class, 1780–1850 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 13–35.
Bennett, “The Multiplication of Culture’s Utility,” 107–134: 107, 115. For the 1845 Museum Bill, see Bennett, “The Exhibitionary Complex,” 344. For the Library Acts, see Thomas Kelly, The History of Public Libraries in Great Britain, 1845–1965 (London: Library Association, 1973).
Ibid. See also Seth Koven, “The Whitechapel Picture Exhibitions and the Politics of Seeing,” in Museum Culture: Histories, Discourses, Spectacles, eds., Daniel J. Sherman and Irit Rogoff (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1994, 22–48.
Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution: An Analysis of the Democratic, Industrial, and Cultural Changes Transforming our Society (New York: Columbia University Press, 1961), 56–58, 125–127.
Two popular studies of Thomas Cook & Son that are frequently, and often uncritically, referenced in the history of travel and tourism are John Pudney, The Thomas Cook Story (London: Michael Joseph, 1953).
Edmund Swinglehurst, The Romantic Journey: The Story of Thomas Cook and Victorian Travel (New York: Harper & Row, 1974).
Thomas Cook, “How to Keep a Tourist Note Book,” in The Excursionist, April 1, 1868. The name of Cook’s advertising newspaper, The Excursionist, varied over time. All subsequent cites will refer to the paper as The Excursionist.
Quoted in James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to ‘Culture’: 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 30.
Thomas Cook, “Pleasure Trips Defended,” The Excursionist, June 1854, 2.
Cook, “Our First Trip to the Continent,” The Excursionist, August 6, 1855, 3. Brendon, Thomas Cook, 63–65.
Cook, “The Anti-Excursion Press of London, and the Continued and Increased Popularity of Cook’s Swiss and Italian Tickets,” The Excursionist, September 18, 1865, 4.
Hugh Cunningham, Leisure in the Industrial Revolution, c. 1780-c.1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1980), 157.
John R. Davis, “The Great Exhibition and the German States,” in Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851, ed. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter A. Hoffenberg (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 147–172; 150.
Quoted in Thomas Cook, “The Harmonizing & Ennobling Influence of the Great Exhibition” in The Excursionist, June 21, 1851, 2–3.
Thomas Cook, “The Great International Excursion to Paris,” The Excursionist, April 27, 1861, 1.
According to the corps’ captain, Kloutz Rowsell, the venture had the implicit sanction of the British minister of war, and the explicit favor of the Emperor Napoleon as a way of maintaining cordial relations between France and England. See J. Klotz-Rowsell, letter to the editor “M. Rowsell and the Volunteers,” The Times, November 12, 1860, 8.
Both Lucraft and Merriman were to become founding members of the International Workingmen’s Association and serve in numerous radical causes. In addition to the Chartist movement and the International, Lucraft chaired the Workingmen’s Peace Society, participated in the Workingmen’s Club and Institute Union, protested against the Contagious Diseases Act, and served on the London School Board. For more on Josiah J. Merriman, see Ann Pottinger Saab, Reluctant Icon: Gladstone, Bulgaria, and the Working Classes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1991), 105–112. Cook explains this network of connections in “The Great International Excursion to Paris,” 144, 1. By 1861, Cook and Paxton had collaborated on many philanthropic projects over the preceding twenty years. Early in Cook’s career, Paxton had assisted with Cook’s temperance excursions to the stately grounds of Chatsworth owned by the Duke of Devonshire, Paxton’s employer at the time. They likely viewed this new venture as one that would put their rational recreation schemes on a grander national and international level, and, it should be added, one that would promote new consumer incentives for railway travel with which they both had vested interests (Paxton had financial ties to the railways). See Brendon, Thomas Cook, 44, 58, 73.
Thomas Cook, “The Great International Excursion to Paris, The Excursionist (April 27, 1861), 1–2.
Margot C. Finn, After Chartism: Class and Nation in English Radical Politics, 1848–1874 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 192.
See also Royden Harrison, “The Setting,” in Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 1–39.
Sir A. Henry Layard, Autobiography and Letters (London: John Murray, 1903), Vol. 2: 234.
Quoted in Gordon Waterfield, Layard of Nineveh (New York: Frederick A. Praeger, 1968), 292–293.
For Layard’s speech, see “Working Men’s Excursion to Paris,” Lloyds Weekly Newspaper, May 12, 1861, 5. Radical republicans in the crowd did not share Layard’s positive perspective about the lessons to be learned in Paris, as the tone of one report suggests. See, Reynolds’s Newspaper, “Working Men’s Proposed Excursion to Paris,” May 12, 1861, 5. For an analysis of governmentality and the “liberal city,” see Patrick Joyce, “City Past and City Present: Building the Liberal City,” chapter 4 in The Rule of Freedom (London: Verso, 2003), esp. 148–149.
Thomas Cook, “The Great International Excursion to Paris,” The Excursionist, April 27, 1861, 1–4.
Cook, “Annual Whitsuntide Trip to Paris,” The Excursionist, May 7, 1863, 1.
Cook, “‘Pecuniary Profit’ and ‘An Honourable Livelihood,’” The Excursionist, February 1, 1868, 8.
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© 2014 Michele M. Strong
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Strong, M.M. (2014). “A True Agent of Civilisation”: Travel and the “Educational Idea,” 1841–1861. In: Education, Travel and the “Civilisation” of the Victorian Working Classes. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338082_2
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