Baedeker’s Guide: Great Britain 1890 (pre-owned)

Suitable for the Victorian tourists, this facsimilie hardback title with a red satin ribbon bookmark, describes seventy two tours of Great Britain, from Scilly to Shetland.
This is the ultimate guidebook for the Victorian Tourist. The latter years of the Victorian era witnessed a massive expansion in the tourist industry. The advent of railways and better roads had, at last, made travel tolerable. For previous generations serious travel had been restricted to the Grand Tour, the gentle and cultured aristocratic exploration of Europe but now, at the end of the nineteenth century, we find that the intrigue of travel has become a fascination for the new middle classes. In 1890, apart from galleries, museums, a few zoos and the occasional glimpse of a stately home there were no ‘attractions’, so instead the early tourist visited Britain, all of it, delving into the character of the villages, market towns, cathedral cities and a countryside that had changed little for centuries. There is advice on money, travel, hotels etc., coloured maps, street plans and fold out maps of the entire railway network. If you seek out the old in your travels, whether for real or from the comfort of your armchair, this book remains perfectly valid. But you might find replicating the journeys on today’s railway network challenging.