Originally published in Saint Pauls (Virtue & Co.) vol.1 #2 (Nov 1867).
There are certain articles which seem to be stereotyped in the presses of our English newspapers. The "stoppage in the streets" indignation paper, the protest against female extravagance in dress, the warning against the speculative tendencies of the age, and a score of other leaders, are so familiar to the "constant reader," that when he takes up his favourite paper, and sees the first sentence, he can tell perfectly well what is coming, and how the article is about to conclude. Amongst the many traditions of the British press, one of the most cherished is that every paper which respects itself is bound to insert at least every year an article contrasting the advantages of home and foreign pleasure-travel,—always, we need hardly say, to the advantage of the former. Somebody,—one of that mysterious body, the unknown correspondents of the newspapers,—writes a letter complaining of some grievance he has sustained in his wanderings abroad. Forthwith a number of fellow-sufferers join in the chorus of complaint. A lively and animated controversy is set on foot as to the insolence,—let us say,—of Prussian railway officials, the absence of foot-baths in French hotels, the annoyances to which English ladies are subjected by the bold glances of foreign admirers, the impossibility of avoiding damp sheets in Swiss hotels, or any one of the countless afflictions to which travelling British flesh appears to be heir abroad. Then, when the topic is pretty well run dry, the paper, which in the dead season has hit upon an unexpected mine of wealth in the wrongs of its valued correspondents, winds up the discussion with one of the stereotyped articles to which we allude. After summing up the case, the leader, we may safely say, concludes somewhat after this fashion;—"Still, while appreciating the grievances of which our correspondents complain, we must tell them candidly that the remedy lies in their own hands. After all, nothing compels them to seek recreation in foreign countries, where tastes, habits, and social institutions are different from,—we might add, inferior to,—those of their native land. Strange as the statement may appear to many of our countrymen, there are districts within a few hours' easy journey of this metropolis whose beauties may be favourably compared with those of the most popular resorts of foreign travel. There are persons, no doubt, who will go from John o' Groats to the Land's End, as well as from Dan to Beersheba, and find that all is barren; but we have no sympathy with that hypercritical disposition which, in its enthusiasm for the grandeur of continental scenery, can find no charm in the humbler but not less exquisite beauty of these varied islands. We have doubtless no mountains equal in magnitude to the Alpine ranges; our lakes cannot compete in size with those of Italy or Switzerland; our rivers are not rivals in volume of water of the Danube and the Rhine; our scenery is on a smaller scale, and on that account is generally the more enjoyable. What the tourist, however, may lose in grandeur, he will find amply compensated in comfort, economy, and freedom from annoyance. Travel, like charity, should begin at home; and if the complaints to which we have given currency should be the means of directing the stream of tourists to the countless scenes of beauty with which the United Kingdom is so richly studded, we shall have done a service to the travelling public."
Some such article as this we must all of us have read at least a score of times in our life. Correspondents, under the signature of "A True Briton," or "John Bull," or "Old England," and who generally would be found at home making their bread as innkeepers or lodging-house owners in English watering-places, write to thank the journal for its able and pathetic appeal on behalf of English scenery; and there the controversy drops. Still our countrymen and countrywomen who want a holiday cross the channel with as much persistency as if the articles in question had never been indited. And our private opinion is, that if all the newspapers in England went on repeating the same exhortations daily from now till next June, there would be no sensible diminution in the number of tourists who will leave England next season for the Continent. Lord Macaulay says that one of the few things in which people really follow their own taste is in the books they buy. We are inclined to include, among the number of things on which people act according to their own pleasure, the tours they take. No doubt there is a good deal of fashion about the resorts of tourists, as about other matters. Zermatt, for instance, has of late years got something of the prestige which formerly attached to Interlaken; but there is no perceptible change in the general current of fashion. Each year, as the facilities of locomotion increase, the tide of tourists sets in more and more strongly for the Continent;—less for our home pleasure-resorts. There is no good in ignoring this fact, or in seeking to explain it by some accidental or transient cause. The only rational account to be given of this phenomenon is that English people prefer spending their holidays abroad to spending them at home. Why they so prefer is a point on which we wish to offer a few suggestions. Partly from desire, partly from necessity, a large portion of the present writer's life has been spent in foreign travel, so that we have acquired a considerable amount of that singularly useless knowledge,—acquaintance with the resorts of tourists in many lands. Of late, circumstances have led us to visit several of our chief home pleasure-grounds; and it is from a comparison of our past and present experiences that we have arrived at the conclusions we desire to lay before the readers of Saint Pauls.
In some not unimportant respects, even if the scenery of Great Britain were far more beautiful than it is, and if the accommodations of home travel were infinitely superior to what they are, our native shores would never be equal to foreign resorts for a native tourist in search of rest. We, even the idlest and wealthiest of us, live very hard and very fast in this land of ours; far harder and far faster than any nation, unless it be our kinsmen across the Atlantic. We crowd as much occupation, whether it be of work or pleasure, into the four-and-twenty hours as they will well bear; and we hardly know what it is to enjoy the luxury of doing nothing. And so, when holiday-time comes round, our natural instinct is to seek change,—to get out of the old treadmill in which we have been toiling,—to leave behind us, as far as possible, the very memory of our labour. Now, in England this is hardly possible to us. Wherever we go we see men engaged in the same restless round of occupation as that from which we have escaped for a season. England, even if we throw in Scotland and Ireland, is a small place as far as area goes, after all; and wherever we may turn, we hear the same ideas uttered, more or less in the same language, read the same papers, and live the same lives. But the moment we have crossed the Straits of Dover we are in a new world, filled with people who speak another tongue, think other thoughts, have other ways, and who, whether for better or worse, are other than the men and women amongst whom our lives are spent. Judging from our own experience, we should say that one day at Boulogne, or Calais, or Dieppe gives more change, and therefore more rest, to the mind of an Englishman than a week spent at Brighton, or Bath, or Cheltenham.
Still, if the longing to change their normal surroundings was the main cause which drives English holiday folk away from home, it would follow that the same causes ought to act elsewhere after the same fashion. Yet we do not find this to be the case. The tourists of other countries travel chiefly in their own lands; and even if they venture beyond its confines they seldom, if ever, come to England for pleasure. Of the thousands of foreign families,—French, German, and Russian,—who crowd every year to the sea-bathing resorts on the coast, from Ostend in the north to Biarritz in the south, not one in five hundred ever even dreams of crossing over for a change to one of our English watering-towns. There must be a reason for this, and that reason we take to consist in this simple fact;—that if you are travelling for pleasure, you can get your pleasure so much more easily, cheaply, and satisfactorily abroad than you can with us.
We have no wish to deny the genuine beauties of our own land. But still it argues no lack of patriotic feeling to admit that our show regions, our lakes and mountains, are not to be reckoned in the same rank as those of Switzerland or Italy or the Tyrol or Norway. Still, if we have no objects,—to use the word in its French signification,—of extraordinary beauty, we have a great amount of pretty country, pleasant to gaze upon and travel in. Indeed, in its peculiar tranquil homely order of beauty, the whole of the south of England seems to us, after having seen many lands, the fairest of its kind of any country that we know. Then, too, we must also grant that the climate of these isles is not exactly adapted to holiday travelling. The utter absence of certainty about our weather at any period of the year tells heavily against the claims of England as a ground for tourists. During the summer season you may have wet days, abroad; but that bugbear of all holiday-goers, a week of continued rain,—an event so common with us,—is a contingency hardly anticipated in foreign summer travel.
Thus, if you want change, or if you wish to feast your eyes on the highest beauties of nature or art, or if you desire fine weather, you naturally go abroad. Still there are such hosts of well-to-do tourists who, from a variety of reasons easily to be imagined, would sooner stop within the Four Seas than seek their recreation abroad, that none of these explanations are quite sufficient to show why you so seldom hear of English people taking a tour for pleasure in their own country. We go to different places to bathe, or hunt, or shoot, or fish; but we, as a rule, no mere think of travelling about England for the pleasure of doing so than we should dream of reading old sermons for our own amusement. Oddly enough, perhaps, the same remark applies to America. There is more locomotion in the States than in any other country; but the natives do not travel about South America as tourists. And the reason we imagine to be, on both sides the Atlantic, that home travel, as compared with continental, is so dear, so uncomfortable, and, above all, so dull.
It is very hard, without entering into details which our space would not permit of, to compare precisely the relative cost of travelling and of hotel expenses abroad and at home. Very long experience, however, has led us to the conclusion that the cost of hotel life on the Continent, taking one place with another, and assuming that you spare yourself no ordinary comfort, and live, in fact, on the footing of the "most favoured" guest, does not exceed twenty francs a day. In England, on the other hand, you have to be very careful if you wish to keep your bill within a pound a day. As to railway fares, they are notoriously higher here than in France, and far higher than in Germany. It costs you more to get from London to Edinburgh or Dublin than it does to get from the same place to Paris or Brussels,—travelling in both cases by express trains at first-class fares. But these long through routes are not the fair test of the cost of travelling in England. If you wish to see the country pleasantly, you naturally prefer to travel short distances, going from point to point where you may desire to stop. Let any traveller act upon this suggestion, and make the journey from London to Scotland, halting at all the different spots he would individually wish to visit along his road, and then compare the amount of his different railway fares with what he would have paid had he traversed the same distance straight through! For some reason,—or, perhaps, for none,—any halt, or stop, or change of carriage in this country is attended with an outlay not required abroad. We do not say people cannot travel cheaply, if they choose, in England; but they must travel uncomfortably if they do; and the first essential for the enjoyment of ordinary travel is that you should be comfortable, and not be bothered about the necessity of looking after shillings and sixpences.
But our chief complaint is, that even if you are tolerably indifferent to expense, you still cannot find comfort in English pleasure-travelling. A great, and by no means the least important, portion of the traveller's existence must be passed in inns. Now, at our English hotels you have undoubtedly the necessaries of travel life, but you have a very small allowance of the luxuries. No man travelling on business has any cause to complain if he gets clean beds, and wholesome food, and decent lodging. These things you can get in our English hostelries as well as in those of any other country; and persons who, like ourselves, have travelled much in countries where clean linen and eatable victuals are rarely to be found, can alone tell what a void in life is caused by their absence. Still, if you are travelling simply and solely for your own gratification; you do desire something more than negative virtues in your purveyors of entertainment. There are a few first-class hotels scattered over England; but still we cannot recall one which has anything of beauty, or elegance, or attractiveness, to recommend it. There are hundreds of inns, known to every continental tourist, which the traveller remembers with a sort of sentimental regard, which he would regret never to visit again, which he would go out of his way to avoid missing on his journeys. Of what single English hotel, from the Clarendon downwards, could a like assertion be made with any degree of credibility? It may be said that hotels like the Bellevue at Dresden, the Bauer at Zurich, the Italia at Florence, owe much to outlooks not to be matched in these islands. This is true; but then, even in English towns where a picturesque view is to be had, our great inns are seldom if ever placed in such positions as to command the view. In fact, the idea that an hotel can, or should be, made anything but a place in which a guest may sleep comfortably and eat decently, seems never to have penetrated the mind of the British landlord. Yet, if you are travelling for pleasure only, you must necessarily pass a considerable period of time within your hotel during which you can neither eat nor sleep. Portions of existence so passed are very dreadful to pass through, not pleasant even to look back upon. It is not always possible to have a sitting-room to yourself, and if you do, you increase your rate of expenditure by at least a half. Moreover, from the very nature of things, the great bulk of the guests at any British inn must necessarily be sitting-roomless. And if it is fine, you cannot be always out of doors; if it rains,—and in our hill-districts it generally does rain,—you must perforce stop indoors. You may, if you like, sit in your bed-room. They are all alike, these English sleeping-places,—the small rooms with the large beds; the chest of drawers covered with a whity-brown macassar; the dingy, gloomy paper; the deal table; the bare walls; the three cane-bottomed chairs; the mahogany washing-stand; the Bible with the name of the hotel stamped upon it,—are common to them all. If you get tired and weary of sitting in your bed-room, you can descend into the public coffee-room. Eating is generally going on there in some form or other all through the day. It is only in a very few of our newest hotels that drawing-rooms exist as an institution; and the smell of meals that have just been, or are now being, or are just about to be, eaten, hangs always about the British coffee-room. A couple of straight-backed black horsehair-covered sofas, a number of chairs of the same material, a sarcophagus-looking sideboard, and a long table, which is always being taken to pieces to have fresh joints added or subtracted, complete the furniture. A county directory, a local newspaper, one copy of the Times, which is generally in hand, and half a dozen placard advertisements of different life-assurance societies, are all the intellectual resources provided for the inmates of this chamber of horrors. If you belong to the male gender, you may possibly smoke in some damp out-of-the-way recess; or, if you are lucky, you may even find a billiard-room, and have a game with a mouldy marker. But if you belong to the fairer half of creation, or have ladies in your party, then you cannot well but chose the coffee-room as your only resort. It may be said that the salles-à-manger of continental inns are not ideal resorts for weather-bound tourists. We acknowledge the justice of the objection; but then it should also be allowed that they are not quite so deadly-lively as English coffee-rooms; that inn bed-rooms abroad are commonly bright, cheerful, airy rooms, which you can use as sitting-rooms with comfort; and, above all, that the smallest continental town, in any of the districts which are frequented by tourists, offers resources not available in similar places at home.
Not very many months ago it was our lot to pass two nights within a short interval of each other at two watering-places on the French and English coasts. In both cases we were delayed accidentally, and were unacquainted with a living soul at the place of our night's sojourn; we had neither books nor occupation; we were thrown entirely upon the resources of the place for amusement. On this side the channel we passed one of the dreariest evenings in our recollection. We ordered dinner, which, as usual in such places, consisted of the invariable sole and mutton cutlet; we walked up and down the pier to get an appetite; we spent as much time as possible over dinner; and then the evening had closed in. We found there were still some four hours which must elapse before we could go to bed. Of public amusements there was nothing, or next to nothing. Mr. Woodin had given his entertainment some days before; and the sisters "Sophia and Anne" were expected in the ensuing week; but the only available place of entertainment open was a fifth-rate music-hall, chiefly patronised by the seafaring population of the place. The billiard-room, which was also the smoking-room, was filled with a number of local young men about town, whose jokes were not interesting to a stranger; and after a stroll through the half-lit, shabby streets, we were obliged to come back to the coffee-room, and amuse ourselves with the advertisement sheet of an old London newspaper which chanced to have been left there.
Across the channel, though the size, character, and "reason of being" of the two towns were exactly similar, our only difficulty lay in the selection of amusements. There was a table-d'hôte dinner, where—the guests being English tourists abroad—there was a good deal of conversation. Before dinner there was an open-air concert given on the pier, at which all the rank and fashion and beauty of the town displayed itself for the benefit of the public. In the evening there was a performance at the theatre, where the acting,—and that is perhaps not saying much,—was up to the rank of an ordinary London playhouse. Besides this, there were the public reception-rooms, open to any decently-dressed stranger on the payment of a franc. The night we were there a concert was given in the rooms; the night following there was to be a ball; the night after that a conjuring performance. Besides, you could cut in, if you liked, at a rubber of whist; you could lose your money in a raffle; you could play at pool in one of the brightest and pleasantest billiard-rooms we have ever seen. And if you preferred wandering about the town, you could look into rows upon rows of bright shop-windows; you could go into a score of handsome cafés, and sit there for as long as you liked at the cost of a few halfpence. It may be said that none of these amusements are very exciting,—that they are all of a frivolous character, in which grown-up people ought not to take delight. But our experience leads us to believe that grown-up travellers are very like children, and want amusement as much as if they had only just left school before they started on their journey. The result of our two evenings passed thus at home and abroad was to cause us to form a mental resolution to avoid the English watering-place in our future travels, and to take the earliest opportunity of revisiting the French one. We quote this experience of ours because it is one whose truth any of our readers may verify for himself without difficulty. A couple of nights passed alternately at Ramsgate and Ostend, Folkestone and Boulogne, Brighton and Dieppe, Hastings and Trouville, will serve, we think, to point a lesson which many years of travel have impressed upon us.
The chief reason then, as we take it, why British holiday-makers who can contrive to get abroad do so almost invariably instead of visiting the pleasure-grounds of their own land, is the total want of amusement provided for tourists in these islands. On a home tour the evenings are mortally and drearily long. We are writing these lines at one of the brightest and most popular of English sea-side towns. The place lives upon visitors, and, but for being a resort of visitors, has no means of existence. Yet, beyond providing them at high rates with board and lodgings, it does nothing whatever for their entertainment. There are no public rooms, no town bands, no sea-side walks or drives, as there would be at any continental watering-place of half the size; there is not even such a thing as a tolerable reading-room where you can see the papers. We have barrel-organs, Ethiopian serenaders, and a Punch and Judy show; but otherwise we have no kind of entertainment. Not only is there no theatre open, but there is not a stage in the town on which plays could be acted. A spectroscope, whatever that may be, has been throughout some three weeks the sole amusement provided for the public of what the guide-books inform us is one of the most fashionable and frequented of the watering-places in the south of England. Nor are we much better off in the way of those creature comforts of which we English people fancy we possess almost a monopoly. The lodging-houses are as bare and comfortless as English lodging-houses are wont to be. The culinary resources of these establishments do not extend beyond chops and steaks and plain roast meat, not bad things doubtless in their way, but still viands which the least dainty palate may find monotonous after a limited time. Yet practically you must either dine at home or not dine at all.
At the one large hotel in the town you can dine with economy for about ten shillings a head, and even then you have an inferior dinner to what you would get at any second-rate restaurant in France for less than half the money. In the whole town there is not a single restaurant, café, or dining-room where you can get anything to eat. Yet, in most respects, I should say this place was above the average of European sea-side towns. The air is beautiful, the sea view remarkably fine, and the surrounding country very pretty; but, with all this, it is inferior as a sojourning place for tourists to foreign baths of far smaller natural beauties, simply because nature has been left to do everything, and art nothing.
So, in the long run, it comes to this, that we all of us think our neighbours would do well to patronise English watering-places and lakes and mountains, to stop in their own country when they are out for a holiday, to spend their money among their own people. But the moment we are called on to choose a holiday tour for ourselves, we at once, and without hesitation, go abroad. We do so because we cannot find the same comforts or amusements or accommodation at home as we do upon the Continent; and though we may fancy others ought to do without these things, we are not disposed to part with them ourselves when we are travelling for the sake of enjoyment. Of course we shall be told that home life can only be had at England;that our people, happily for themselves, do not spend their evenings at theatres. and cafés, but take their pleasure in the bosom of their families; and that, therefore, the sources of recreation which are open to the continental pleasure-seeker are not available to our native tourists when on "pleasure bent." The "pleasure of the domestic fireside" argument is often driven further than it will bear; but, to a certain extent, it is sound; and we admit that the home life of England could hardly be what it is if our cities offered greater resources of entertainment to the homeless traveller. But exactly for that reason, though we may select to live in England, we prefer to spend our holidays away from its shores. We share this conviction with the overwhelming majority of the tourist world, and our only wonder is that, in the face of the experience of years, our papers should still go on repeating assertions about the charms of English travel which writers and readers alike know at heart to be false and groundless.