ENGLISH TRAVELLERS AND ENGLISH GUIDE-BOOKS.
IF l3adeker would only come to England and Ireland, and apply his method to the production of Guides to our English Counties, we suspect he would soon reap a great harvest of profit from the speculation. It is true that Mr. Murray gives us very thorough and instructive, though rather heavy, County Guides, and that Mr. Black has furnished us with a series of much more port- able and cheaper works of the same class ; but so far as our experi- ence goes, neither Black's nor Murray's County Guides, still less their Guides to Ireland, answer the purposes which Bideker's Guides to Germany, Switzerland and the Tyrol answer so admir- ably. In the first place, the English Guide-writers are too ambitious, and in the next, they don't throw themselves into the position of the travellers, whose staff and compass they ought to be. They will tell you a great deal you don't at all want to know, and they won't tell you what it is quite necessary for your comfort to know. We will not go so far as to say that the British tourist does not usually care to know all the country seats in the neighbourhood of any place he may visit: But we will say that a great many such travellers don't care a rush for information of this kind, and feel rather bored by it :—" The mansion is plain, consisting of a centre with projecting wings, but very pleasantly situated ; an ample lawn sloping down to the river bank ; an amphitheatre of magnificent trees sloping gradually around it ;" or this :—" To the north is situated the well-wooded park, encircling a handsome 'mansion, whose classical facade is really very good and graceful. It was built about forty years ago, from the designs of Mr. Vokin s, a London artist." Yet that is the sort of information which fills up, we should think, one-third almost of the English and Irish Guide-books, a good deal of space being uniformly devoted to the history of the families who reside in these magnificent mansions. Well, we will not say that the average British tourist despises this minute information about all the big " places " in the neighbourhood he visits. But we do say there is information which it is much more essential for him to have which the Guide-books hardly ever give him, and not a little which it would be very interesting to him to have which the Guide-books cannot give him, only because they are crammed up with the descriptions of the fine rooms in these big houses, and the common-place monuments in the village church. To us, we con- fess, all these minutim about the big houses is infinitely depress- ing; and we could spare not a few of the statements about Town-halls, built in no particular style by no architect worth mention, or commercial schools in the Rlizabethan style, or a local Athenmum erected in 1813, and the like. That is the sort of thing which strikes one with despair when one takes up a Guide, and which makes one lay it down so very quickly again, that even useful information which it does contain secreted away somewhere, is often missed. Who wants to see all the stupid Grammar Schools or stupider Athenmuins in theprovincial towns of England? People travel, we suppose, for new impressions of some kind, of either beauty, or dignity, or grandeur, or quaintness, or grotesqueness, and not to fill their eyes with a number of common-place shapes, which they forget again at once, or which they recall with regret, if they are unhappy enough to recall them at all.
The first thing a traveller wants to know about a place be- fore he goes to it, is, what there is in or near it which le might wish to go there on purpose to see ; and next, what is the best place in which to take up his residence, when he gets there. On neither of these points are our English guide-books at all explicit They enumerate in the most dutiful way all the things which it will certainly bore you to see, but they hardly ever hint that it will be an unspeakable bore, and they describe the rubbish at a length almost as wearisome as the noblest scenes. Then, again, before you get to a place, you want to know which of its inns will suit you best, and, for that purpose, where they are situated, and what are the advantages of each situation. Biideker almost always tells you this clearly, so that with one of his Guides you know before-hand what course to decide upon. But in no respect are Murray's and Black's Guides less informing than in relation to the inns. They give you a dry list, leaving you to assume that the inn first mentioned is the most important, but they say nothing at all of the situation, whether noisy or quiet, whether commanding a view or commanding none, whether near the pleasantest walks or far from them, and you enter the town,
therefore, with just as much and just as little knowledge as to the inns you would be likely to prefer, as you would have if you did not possess a guide at all.
Then, again, what you usually travel for is to see the most characteristic and beautiful scenery. Now it is pretty certain that in most of Black's County Guides, and many even of Murray's, you will get little or no information about any vil- lage which is so small as to have no considerable inn, even though it may be the very centre of some of the loveliest scenery in the neighbourhood. Yet you would give up a good deal of information as to the geological strata of a county, or the history of a county town from the Conquest to the present day, or technical criticisms on church architecture, to know where you ought to try and get a lodging if you really want to see the most characteristic scenery in the most thorough manner. This we can certainly say,—that in recent explorations of two or three English counties, the situations in which we found the greatest charm were those not even hinted at in the Guide-books, while the places most highly praised in the Guide-books were removed to a most inconvenient distance from the more charming scenes. Of course, that is iv great measure due to the fact that the pleasantest places are the most soli- tary, and that you cannot always get any accommodation at all where you would best like to stay. Still the Guide- books leave you to find this out for yourselves, when a hint to that effect would often put you on inquiries which would result in your seeing twice as much as you would otherwise see, with half the trouble. Again, the English and Irish Guide-books are most remiss in mentioning the finest walks in the neigh- bourhood even of the spots which they do profess to describe. Mideker will almost always tell you of any very fine walk in the neighbourhood of a Swiss or a Tyrolese inn, and exactly how to find it. He will say,—" Go up the road about five minutes' walk to the east of the inn, and then turn over a stile to the left," and so forth, and you seldom find any difficulty in following his directions. But the English and Irish Guide-books hardly ever help the traveller in this way. They will tell you, of course, about the formal "sights," and they are most minute in discriminating between the styles of architecture of the old and new parts of the various churches,—whether they are Perpendicular, or Decorated, or Early-English, or Norman, or Renaissance. But what you want to know, first and fore- most, when you get to a pleasant country place,—namely, which way to walk to get the most characteristic notion of the geography of the place ; and next, which way to walk to see the most sequestered nooks, which, without being told of them before, you would be too likely to miss,—this our Guide- books hardly ever seem to tell you. And the worst of it is that this sort of information is hardly ever supplied on the spot. Often the local population think very little of the beauties of their own neighbourhood, and not unfrequently have not even heard that they are to be admired at all.
The cardinal vice of our Guide-books is that they worry us with the history, geology, antiquarianism, and all the dry information concerning the places we go to see, which they can collect, and regard themselves in fact as giving us a sort of " object-lesson " on our travels. Now that is a radically bad point of view. We want to enjoy ourselves, not to be put through a series of dates and scientific facings ; and they occupy all the space which is wanted for helping us to enjoy ourselves, with pedantic stuff that is only fit for the Archmological Society, or the Geological Society, or the Camden Society, or the Numismatic Society, or some other Society whose object is to make you realise what a bore it is to have had ancestors who have left behind them so many tire- some signs of themselves which it is both troublesome and unin- structive to have paraded before your bewildered eyes.
Previous page
