Journal of Victorian Culture

Mann,, Paisley

doi: 10.1093/jvcult/vcz060pmid: N/A

Abstract Both E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908) and Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–1857) satirize British guidebook users, depicting them as mindless followers rather than as individual explorers of foreign landscapes. Series by John Murray and Baedeker dominated the landscape of Victorian travel, and scholars have pointed out that while mainstream guidebooks made foreign tourism more accessible for the middle class, they also presented travel as a heavily prescriptive and systematic endeavour, one that often sheltered British travellers from an encounter with foreignness. This article extends our understanding of the Victorian guidebook’s legacy by examining three Anglo-American guidebooks for women travelling to Paris – Mary Abbot’s A Woman’s Paris (1900), Elizabeth Otis Williams’ Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris (1907), and Alice M. Ivimy’s A Woman’s Guide to Paris (1909). It suggests that these fin-de-siècle women’s guidebooks emerged as a critique both of mainstream guidebooks’ prescriptive approach to foreign travel and of the narrow interests to which they catered. This article shows how, in actively resisting the genre’s emphasis on uniformity and expediency, guidebooks for women instead privileged spontaneous discovery, personal interest, and an encounter with the Parisian culture and landscape. In doing so, it seeks to reformulate our understanding of women’s travel narratives and of the cultural legacy of Victorian guidebooks. 1. INTRODUCTION The soul of a big city is not to be grasped so easily; in order to make contact with it, you have to have been bored, you have to have suffered a bit in those places that contain it. Anyone can get hold of a guide and tick off all the monuments, but within the very confines of Paris there is another city as difficult of access as Timbuktu once was (Julian Green)1 In the chapter entitled ‘In Santa Croce with No Baedeker’ in E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View (1908), the heroine Lucy Honeychurch learns what it is like to ‘simply drift’ through the streets of Florence, having been ‘emancipate[d]’ from her Baedeker guidebook by Miss Lavish, who asserts that ‘[Baedeker] does but touch the surface of things. As to the true Italy – he does not even dream of it. The true Italy is only to be found by patient observation’.2 While Forster is mocking Miss Lavish’s pretentious disdain of conventional travel, he also calls attention to the rigid and oppressive uniformity of travel created by Victorian guidebooks, and A Room with a View presents guidebook-mediated travel as equally deserving of derision. Using free indirect discourse, the narrator satirizes Lucy’s apprehension of guidebook-less travel, noting that, in Santa Croce without her Baedeker, ‘[t]here was no one even to tell her which, of all the sepulchral slabs that paved the nave and transepts, was the one that was really beautiful, the one that had been most praised by Mr Ruskin’.3 Later in the novel, Mr Eager remarks on the dehumanizing power of guidebooks that turns tourists into ‘a parcel of goods’ to be ‘handed about . . . from Venice to Florence, from Florence to Rome, living herded together in pensions or hotels, quite unconscious of anything that is outside Baedeker, their one anxiety to get “done” or “through” and go on somewhere else’.4 Although written during the height of Victorian tourism, Charles Dickens’s Little Dorrit (1855–1857) similarly disparages how the nineteenth-century guidebook’s views supplanted personal observations: the narrator observes that, when abroad, British travellers seem to become ‘a collection of voluntary human sacrifices, bound hand and foot, and delivered over to Mr. Eustace and his attendants, to have the entrails of their intellects arranged according to the taste of that sacred priesthood’.5 Foremost in this ‘sacred priesthood’ of travel writers were Karl Baedeker and John Murray, whose firms published series of guidebooks that dominated the landscape of nineteenth-century British travel.6 Written for ‘a new generation of travellers’ with more diverse backgrounds and travelling needs than the male aristocratic youths on the Grand Tour of the previous century, these guidebooks were responding to the ‘dramatic transformation in travel’ that occurred with the advent of the railway and that allowed a wider range of Britons to experience the Continent.7 Although guidebooks had existed in earlier incarnations, in many ways the series issued by Baedeker and Murray created a new standard for the genre, establishing conventions like lists of essential sights, practical information, and proposed itineraries. Despite the immense popularity of this new generation of guidebooks, many Victorians, echoing the narrator in Little Dorrit, lamented the cultural authority that these guidebooks held, as well as their ‘increasingly organized, bureaucratic framework’.8 Leslie Stephen derided ‘the tourist’ as ‘a person who follows blindly a certain hackneyed round; who never stops long enough before a picture or a view to admire it or to fix it in his memory’.9 With this rise in the accessibility of foreign travel, ‘the tourist’, the avid reader and follower of mainstream guidebooks, became a popular figure against which to position oneself.10 Despite such nineteenth-century critiques of the institutionalized travel that guidebook series like Baedeker and Murray proposed, however, the genre largely continued to present foreign travel as a heavily prescriptive endeavour, and additional series by Adam and Charles Black and George Bradshaw adopted many of the conventions for which Baedeker and Murray had become known. In this article, I suggest that late-Victorian and Edwardian Anglo-American guidebooks for women travelling to Paris emerged as a critique both of mainstream guidebooks’ prescriptive approach to foreign travel and of their implicit – though perhaps unintentional – hierarchy of foreign sights. Paris’s proximity to Britain, its impressive architecture and collections of art, as well as its frequent hosting of world’s fairs (1855, 1867, 1878, 1889, 1900) made it a popular destination for British travellers. That numerous travel publishers created frequent editions of their Paris guidebooks meant that Victorians were accustomed to seeing the French capital through the lens of the mainstream guidebook; guidebooks for female travellers positioned themselves against an already well-established set of values and assumptions about how to see Paris. Given the relatively niche market to which they catered, there are only a few female-authored guidebooks for female travellers to Paris, and they have remained largely unexplored even by scholars of travel writing. However, despite being few in number, these texts offer important insights into the evolution of travel writing more broadly as well as into the ways in which women experienced the city and intervened in mainstream tourism. In this article, I look at three such guidebooks – Mary Abbot’s A Woman’s Paris: A Handbook of Every-day Living in the French Capital (1900), Elizabeth Otis Williams’ Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris (1907), and Alice M. Ivimy’s A Woman’s Guide to Paris (1909) – and argue that these writers of guidebooks for women consciously constructed their texts as reinventions of the guidebook genre and gestured to the ways in which the information they provided redressed the mistakes of mainstream (masculine-authored) guided travel.11 Rather than offering protection from foreign manners and morals, a charge made about mainstream guidebooks,12 these guidebooks for women advocated a more immersive travel experience. Actively resisting the genre’s emphasis on uniformity, expediency, and a mastery of the guidebook’s cultural information, guidebooks for women instead privileged spontaneous discovery and personal interest; in these guides, travel was, first and foremost, a personal encounter with Parisian culture and landscape, not a means to explore what others had seen and deemed important. That women’s guidebooks advocated this more immersive, meandering approach to exploring Paris is significant, as scholars have pointed out that the relationship fin-de-siècle women had to their own cities was often complex and contested. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, middle- and upper-class women gained greater access to the London metropolis through social clubs, shopping, and philanthropy.13 However, while such activities may have given women reasons to be present in the city, to appear aimless or alone could often expose them to physical or social danger.14 As Deborah L. Parsons suggests, although ‘women’s access to the metropolis was expanding, both in terms of leisure and employment’, it was also ‘undoubtedly true’ that, ‘compared to men’, ‘women had restricted access to the public life of the city’.15 In foregrounding urban opportunities and providing women with the information – and confidence – needed to enjoy the city without an accompanying male presence, these female-authored guidebooks, written for the ‘Solitary Woman’16 visiting Paris, formed part of a conscious effort to write women into the spaces of cities. Moreover, in their specific endorsement of outdoor leisure activities and of walking, they posited a sort of female counterpart to the flâneur, the male nineteenth-century urban explorer whom Charles Baudelaire described as ‘a passionate spectator’ who experienced ‘immense joy’ through strolling the city and being ‘in the heart of the multitude, amid the ebb and flow of movement’.17 Although women would not have been able to experience the city in the same way as the male flâneur, whose gender would have allowed for a more privileged, anonymous exploration of the city,18 these female travel writers nonetheless aimed to carve out a space and touring style specifically for women that was grounded in an ambulatory experience of the Paris. In critiquing and reformulating the hurried, obligation-filled approach of mainstream guidebooks and in offering women greater access to the quotidian spaces of the city, these women’s guidebooks positioned travel to Paris as a site of female resistance. In Paris, these guidebooks suggested, women could craft a city space of their own. 2. VICTORIAN GUIDEBOOK CULTURE: AN OVERVIEW Victorian guidebooks, with their prescribed itineraries and commentary on ‘what current tourists could anticipate’, were themselves a reaction to earlier nineteenth-century guidebooks, which envisioned a far narrower and more privileged subset of travellers.19 Written for ‘the sons or grandsons of the eighteenth-century Grand Tourists’, early nineteenth-century guidebooks such as Edward Planta’s A New Picture of Paris assumed readers were ‘of a certain social and economic standing’ and tailored their information accordingly.20 In fact, as Roger Clark points out, the pre-Victorian guidebook functioned more as ‘dictionary or a compendium’ than a typical guidebook, and as such, it often ‘left [a traveller] very much to his own devices, to thread his own way through the Parisian maze’.21 With the expansion of travel and the increasingly diverse backgrounds of British travellers, however, came the need for publications that offered more explicit guidance and background information. While meandering through the Parisian maze might have suited the previous generation of travellers, the British middle classes were, as James Buzard points out, ‘in neither the position nor the humour to squander their resources’.22 Consequently, and with an eye to the needs of this new travelling class, Murray’s and Baedeker’s firms ‘standardized’ the guidebook form, providing information on money, passports, accommodation, restaurants, and other practical details as well as offering travel routes, detailed itineraries, and lists of essential sights. Thus, they purported ‘to put everything the tourists needed to know for the efficient fulfilment of their itineraries between the covers of their handbooks’.23 As scholars of the travel book genre have shown, the impact of Murray, Baedeker and other Victorian guidebook publishers was far-reaching and complex, and in condensing my discussion of their key features, I do not wish to suggest that the different publications were indistinguishable from one another. However, a lengthier discussion of the characteristics of Victorian guidebooks is beyond the scope of this article, and as such, I will focus on some of the implicit values evident in mainstream guides to Paris in order to demonstrate more clearly the cultural conversation into which Paris guidebooks for women entered, as well as the specific ideologies that they so vocally resisted.24 As such, I have focused less on the guidebooks’ democratizing potential and more on the characteristics that the later women’s guidebooks saw as problematic. Common across many Victorian guidebooks was an emphasis on making efficient use of time, and James Buzard suggests that the names Baedeker and Murray ‘passed into the cultural vocabulary . . . as symbol[s] of inerrant efficiency’.25 The need to maximize one’s time in each city stemmed from the fact that middle-class travellers – unlike the previous travellers on the Grand Tour, for whom extended stays were the norm – had a more limited travel schedule, but it led to what Roger Clark has termed ‘highly exhausting . . . programmes of visit’ with ‘punishing . . . excursions’.26 Guidebooks calculated the number of days needed for different cities and also provided suggestions for how many hours to spend at particular museums or other tourist sights, a feature that James Buzard calls the ‘arithmetical allotting of cultural time’.27 They also emphasized the need to follow carefully crafted, efficient routes between these tourist sights: Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (1888) prescribed routes to help the traveller to ‘regulat[e] his movements and economis[e] his time . . . so as to avoid loss of time and unnecessary detours’.28Bradshaw’s Illustrated Guide through Paris and its Environs (1855) suggested a similarly structured and systematic approach to the city, one that was again based on saving time and energy: The object of the present guide, is not only to answer the question, What is to be seen? but the not less essential one, How is it to be seen? and this too in a convenient and methodical form. By arranging the places to be visited each day according to their proximity to each other, a great advantage is gained. The tourist will have no wild chase after a ‘lion’ in one quarter of the town, and another immediately after in an opposite and distant locality. More may therefore be seen in the same time and with less fatigue.29 Without the use of the guide, the writer suggests, travellers would be forced to cover much more ground in their attempts to see the city’s ‘lions’ – the Victorian-era term for the main tourist attractions. Implicit here is the assumption that nothing between these sights is important and that traversing the city means ‘wasting time’.30 Visiting Paris efficiently, therefore, involved extricating the ‘lions’ from the city that surrounded them; the interstices, the urban spaces between tourist sights, were seemingly unimportant in this conception of time-conscious travel. Although this emphasis on economizing time demonstrates how the Victorian guidebook adapted to middle-class travel needs, the privileging of efficient tourism, as well as the guidebooks’ pre-formed itineraries and hierarchy of sights, also arguably inculcated a rigid uniformity in Victorian travel. The Preface for multiple editions of Murray’s Handbook for Visitors to Paris did explain that ‘the visitor [could] form his own plans, according to his occupation and tastes, and to the time he [could] devote to their examination’.31 However, both Murray and Baedeker also used a system of asterisks to rank sights based on – to use Murray’s terms – ‘their merit or importance’, and such wording runs counter to the individual tastes mentioned in the Preface.32 In particular, guidebooks placed great value on art and the appreciation of high culture, inundating readers with cultural information viewed as requisite for their journey and emphasizing the importance of visiting museums like the Louvre. Editions of Baedeker’s Paris and Environs from the 1870s onwards included a section entitled either ‘Sketch of French Art’ or ‘Remarks on French Art’ because, as Professor Anton Springer noted in his remarks in the 1888 edition, ‘[t]he visitor to the Metropolis of France will naturally be desirous of knowing something about the character and history of the national art’.33 Grant Allen’s Paris (1900) devoted over 120 pages to the Louvre’s history and holdings to ensure that readers knew how and what to see before their visit, and he proposed that ‘[a]t least six days – far more, if possible’ be spent in the Louvre.34 Allen also sets up for readers a strict reading schedule that required cultural instruction prior to one’s trip: ‘The portions of this book intended to be read at leisure at home, before proceeding to explore each town or monument, are enclosed in brackets’, while ‘the portion relating to each principal object should be quietly read and digested before a visit, and referred to again afterwards’.35 This form of cultural instruction found in guidebooks was favourably described in the Edinburgh Review as ‘leading the imperfect public taste in the best and worthiest fashion’.36 While it is true that, with this extensive background information on the Louvre and other cultural institutions, the guidebook acted as ‘a great leveller of knowledge and of culture’ for ‘its middle-class readership’, it also implied a hierarchy of value.37 Even as Victorian-era travel allowed for a greater range of travellers, it seems that guidebooks also posited a uniformity of interests. Although the guidebook genre itself necessitates a somewhat authoritative stance on cities, nineteenth-century editions presented Paris in a particularly didactic way, using language that would further encourage travellers to organize their days based on their guidebooks’ suggestions. Allen’s Paris (1900) and the 1888 edition of Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs instructed readers to ‘utilize’ and to ‘devote’ rainy days to exploring the city’s museums, seemingly assuming that their readers would not have been able to come to that decision on their own.38 Likewise, Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (1878) recommended that visitors wanting to experience Parisian life ‘[sit] at one of the small tables . . . in front of the cafés on the Boulevards’ but offered the following rather obvious word of caution: ‘[c]hairs placed in unpleasant proximity to the gutter should, however, be avoided’.39 Enjoyable activities were frequently cast as learning experiences: Baedeker’s Paris and Environs (1900) advocated walking the boulevards because it was ‘interesting and instructive’.40Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1859 similarly turned the act of experiencing ‘the pleasures of the palate’ and ‘the sight of one of the most animated panoramas Europe can afford’ into a duty, telling readers that they ‘ought’ to eat at a window table overlooking the boulevards.41 The Victorian guidebook, therefore, inserted itself as a constant mediator between the city and the traveller; it shaped travellers’ impressions of and movements throughout the city. Some guidebook writers even seemed to encourage a reliance on their text’s insights: in addition to passages intended for prior reading, Grant Allen also includes a ‘portion to be read on the spot’ that ‘is printed in large legible type, so as to be easily read in the dim light of churches, chapels and galleries’ and that has ‘[t]he keynote words . . . printed in bold type, to catch the eye’.42 The numerous accounts of people replicating the travel experiences found in their guidebooks suggest that many Victorian travellers did not stray very far from the itineraries and even the emotional responses that they found in their Murray or Baedeker.43 Although facilitating greater travel opportunities for the middle and, later, working classes, these guidebooks also simultaneously limited – perhaps inadvertently, by virtue of their widespread adoption – the travel experience, as visiting with a guidebook in hand often meant seeing the places that Murray or Baedeker valued and encountering them in the way they instructed.44 Scholars have pointed out that female travellers benefitted from travel becoming more mainstream. Lynne Withey notes that the majority of travellers on Thomas Cook’s tours were women, and Jan Palmowski argues that Murray and Baedeker ‘gave women the independence and the wherewithal to enjoy foreign cultures’.45 However, as my above reading suggests, Murray and Baedeker’s legacy is multi-faceted. With their uniform and efficient vision of travel, guidebooks narrowed the range of tourist experiences even as they opened up the city for a broader demographic of travellers. Foreign cities, therefore, were experienced through the heavily mediated influence of the Victorian guidebook. It is this distancing and constrained approach to travel that the later guidebooks for women specifically critiqued through repositioning travel as an individual encounter with foreign space and emphasizing strolling and serendipity instead of efficient circulation and pre-planned itineraries. 3. LATE-VICTORIAN LADY GUIDES AND A FEMALE APPROACH TO THE CITY To be sure, British women had been involved in the travel writing genre much earlier than the fin-de-siècle period: Lady Sydney Morgan’s France (1817); Frances Trollope’s Paris and the Parisians (1836); Martha Macdonald Lamont’s Impressions, Thoughts, and Sketches, During Two Years in France and Switzerland (1844); Dinah Mulock Craik’s Fair France: Impressions of a Traveller (1871); Emma Georgina Elizabeth Ward’s Outside Paris during the Two Sieges. By an Englishwoman (1871); and Matilda Betham Edwards’ A Year in Western France (1877) and Holidays in Eastern France (1879) are only a small number of British, female-authored memoirs about France written during the nineteenth century.46 Moreover, while scholarship has until recently overlooked or underrepresented their involvement, Elisabeth Jay points out that British women worked as foreign correspondents in Paris although, compared to ‘their male counterparts’, female journalists ‘concentrated on the domestic side of urban life, interiors rather than street scenes, sketches of typical female activities rather than of male leisure pursuits’.47 In the later decades of the nineteenth century, however, women began to take a more active role in urban tourism. While travel memoirs are arguably the record of an individual’s understanding of place, women’s later involvement in guidebooks and guided tours positioned their knowledge as representative and worthy of being replicated by others and, in particular, by other women.48 The Lady Guide Association was one such avenue for women wishing to play a more active role in the tourism industry, and it represents the emergence of a specifically ‘feminine’ way of travelling. Created in 1888, the group initially employed gentlewomen to conduct tourists around London;49 as an article in Littel’s Living Age noted, the women could take ‘ladies, or mixed parties of gentlemen and ladies – but never gentlemen travelling en garcon’.50 There were also women available for hire who would conduct British tourists through the French capital; under the Miscellaneous section of ‘Notices’ in an 1889 issue of the Standard newspaper, for instance, is an advertisement for a ‘Lady Guide’ in Paris.51 The Lady Guide Association appears to have been sizable entity; an 1890 newspaper article about them published in New Zealand’s Tuapeka Times – a location which itself suggests the Association’s popularity – noted that the Lady Guides had ‘upwards of 700 ladies registered’ as guides.52 Although research into the cultural reception of the Lady Guides is limited, the number of times that they appear as the punch line in Victorian humour magazines suggests that Lady Guides were enough of a recognized phenomenon of British travel to warrant discussion, and enough of a destabilizing presence to warrant mockery. Indeed, two Punch texts from the same year (1889) speak to the popularity of Lady Guides and the ways in which society viewed women who stepped into the masculine space of tourism. Punch included the following definition of Lady Guides: ‘Miss-guided folks in Paris. – Evidently those who are personally conducted by “Lady Guides”’.53 Although it suggests that women tour guides are somewhat ineffective, the short article registers the increasing popularity of women travelling to Paris without male relatives. In its pun on ‘misguided’, the cartoon also speaks to the differing pace and priorities of female travellers in relation to more traditional guidebooks. In addition, the cartoon below (Figure 1), while also poking fun at the profession, indicates a fin-de-siècle desire to see Paris as a woman independent from the protection of a husband or family. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Certified English Lady Eiffel Tourist Guides to Paris During the Exhibition’, Punch, 4 May 1889, 205. Photograph taken at Robertson Davies Library, Massey College, 16 December 2019. Figure 1. Open in new tabDownload slide ‘Certified English Lady Eiffel Tourist Guides to Paris During the Exhibition’, Punch, 4 May 1889, 205. Photograph taken at Robertson Davies Library, Massey College, 16 December 2019. The lack of serious consideration of the Lady Guides on the part of the British press seems to have been widespread. The 1888 article ‘Lady Guides’ in the Saturday Review deliberately misinterpreted the Lady Guide’s advertisement by expressing ‘hopeless puzzle[ment]’ over who the Lady Guides would be accompanying: if they are escorting ‘those other than gentlemen travelling en “garcon”’ does that mean they will be accompanying ‘foreign cads’?54 Likewise, an 1889 cartoon and poem in Fun entitled ‘The Lady Guide and the Tory Tourist’ depicted the Lady Guide as a beautiful and forceful suffragette attempting to ‘guide’ men to extend the vote to women.55 Jokes about Lady Guides appear to have had staying power. In 1895, Judy’s ‘Another Lady Guide’ characterized the female guide as somewhat impatient and unhelpful, telling tourists only the most obvious of information: when in St Paul’s churchyard, she tells her group, ‘[t]his is St. Paul’s. I will not say any more, because you would forget what I had told you by the time you get up’, and when they reach the top, she says, ‘[w]e are now at the top of the Cathedral. I will not explain to you what can be seen from here because you would be sure to forget it before we got down’.56 Despite the perceived lack of cultural authority that the Lady Guides held, I consider the endeavour as an important landmark in the creation of a mainstream ‘feminine’ way of seeing cities. As Erika D. Rappaport suggests, the focus on female travel had an agency-giving effect: it ‘rewrote women’s urban vision and the vision of urban women . . . [and] created the flâneuse, a female urban stroller who was at home in the city, who enjoyed walking in and writing about the urban crowd and the city’s shops’.57 Similarly, I suggest that the Lady Guides offered another way of seeing Paris and set up an association between women and the Paris streets. As guides, women became experts in the Paris streets and sights, and tourism became increasingly feasible for women travelling alone. 4. HOW TO TRULY SEE PARIS: WOMEN’S GUIDEBOOKS AND THE CRITIQUE OF MAINSTREAM TRAVEL Publishers in the decades that followed also began to recognize the emerging importance of catering specifically to the single woman in Paris. Mary Abbot’s A Woman’s Paris: A Handbook of Every-day Living in the French Capital (1900) and Elizabeth Otis Williams’ Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris: A Handbook Particularly for Women (1907) were published in the United States, and Alice M. Ivimy’s A Woman’s Guide to Paris (1909) was printed on both sides of the Atlantic, suggesting both American and British women’s interest in travelling to Paris on their own or with other women.58 That these guidebooks were written by American women but used by British women perhaps suggests that, while British women also wanted to explore Paris on their own, American women – more removed from but still aware of the cultural weight of Victorian travel conventions – were better positioned to critique and to reform mainstream tourism. Given the emphasis on female safety in more mainstream British guidebooks – which, as Buzard notes, presented the Continent as a place requiring British men to keep ‘constant vigilance’ when travelling with women and ‘often address[ed] matters of [female] sanitation and security’ – one might assume that a primary function of women’s Paris guidebooks was to provide female travellers with more extensive safety precautions than mainstream guidebooks could offer.59 However, while these publications for women gave safety advice, rather than emphasizing restrictions and precautions, they strongly cautioned against limiting a female visitor’s interaction with the city and refuted the notion that female travel required hyper vigilance. The guidebooks’ content and the number of pages spent on particular subjects also demonstrated a conscious shift away from the preoccupations of mainstream guidebooks; they jettisoned extensive discussions of French art and history and did not replicate the itineraries and must-see sights of male-authored handbooks.60 To varying extents, these guidebooks for women acknowledged readers’ potential interest in Parisian fashion. For example, Williams’ title includes shopping as one of three main activities, and incorporated sections on purchasing women’s clothing items, such as corsets and lingerie. Abbot and Ivimy’s guides also mention where readers can purchase articles of clothing and offer advice on what to wear at the theatre.61 However, that these women’s guidebooks differ from mainstream guidebooks in their priorities and distribution of information suggests not a desire to feminize tourism but rather to critique the suppositions about travel that Murray and Baedeker made. I argue that women’s guidebooks to Paris aimed ultimately to redress the guidebook genre’s cautious and time-conscious style of travel; they constructed female tourism as a means for becoming immersed in the culture and rhythms of Paris and aimed to craft not only a new vision for female travel but for foreign travel more generally.62 For all three writers, greater freedom of movement was central to their new vision for female travel, and as such, they stressed the importance both of inhabiting the space of the city as well as recognizing Paris as predominantly safe for women.63 The preface of each guidebook made clear this purpose for writing: while the prefatory material in a Baedeker or Murray volume often focused on more generic tourist concerns such the efficient use of time and thorough examination of sights, the prefaces to these women’s guidebooks focused squarely on ‘women and girls going to Paris’ and aimed to make solo travel possible for them.64 The three writers did let their readers know where to exercise caution or to avoid going alone, and Williams was perhaps the most cautious: she recognized that women ‘hesitate to go to places of amusement without escort . . . unless they are very sure what places they may go to, and what seats to take, and how to dress’, and while she divided restaurants into two sections – ‘where Women may Dine Alone’ and ‘where Women may Go with an Escort’, she did not offer many options for a woman on her own.65 Likewise, Ivimy instructed readers not to visit Montmartre’s restaurants alone and cautioned against staying at ‘very large houses [or] at those with bars’; similarly, she discouraged readers from visiting the circus, because ‘the class of public [was] not very select and women would scarcely care for the rough-and-tumble style of the place’.66 However, despite these cautions, these women’s guidebooks also repeatedly conveyed that many places in Paris were accepting of solitary female travellers. Ivimy was primarily concerned with opening up rather than restricting women’s experiences of the city, and she described Paris as a city where women could attend the theatre on their own and where, in the restaurants of the Latin Quarter, ‘a woman alone is the commonest of sights’.67 Ultimately, Ivimy envisioned her guidebook as performing a necessary public service for the ‘Solitary Woman visiting Paris for the first time’ who ‘is hampered at every turn by agonizing doubts and fears’ and who avoided excursions for fear that single women could not partake in them.68 Of the typical ‘Solitary Woman’, Ivimy wrote: She has of course a rooted conviction that the streets of the city, after five o’clock, are full of dangers for the unprotected female, and as in America it is not the custom for a woman to eat in restaurants except under male chaperonage, she would perish of hunger rather than cross the threshold of an eating-house. Still less, would she go along to a play.69 Ivimy continued this portrayal, suggesting that the typical female traveller limited herself to ‘a dull dinner in the hotel’ lest she ‘be stared at’ in a restaurant and ‘retire[d] for the night to write letters and diaries until it seem[ed] reasonable to go to bed’ because she did not know what activities she could do alone.70 Concerned with the ways in which British and American women’s beliefs about public space held them back from fully experiencing Paris, Ivimy positioned herself as a mentor who would open up the streets of Paris to single women travellers and show them how to circulate with confidence; her guidebook’s aim was to show ‘how many interesting and amusing things [the Solitary Woman] [could] do and see . . . without the smallest inconvenience’.71 Not restricted to a narrow range of restaurants, activities, and streets, female travellers, Ivimy suggested, could tour Paris in relative freedom. Writing nine years earlier, Abbot was somewhat more cautious than Ivimy, but her hesitation seems to have stemmed not from matters of actual safety but from a belief that Parisian society was less progressive than the United States in its acceptance of women in public. If the female traveller ‘enjoys any freedom at all in going and coming, she is criticized by such French friends as she may have happened to make; and if she is sensitive, she may care for that’.72 Despite this opinion, however, Abbot commented that ‘[y]ou can defy French opinion and be happy’ and seemed to contradict her impression of French society by stating elsewhere that, ‘[a]s far as prestige goes, a lady may live anywhere in Paris, just as a man may in other cities’.73 Indeed, like Ivimy, Abbot advocated for an immersive experience of Parisian life, suggesting that because ‘[h]otel life is not French, and leads to nothing solid in the way of experience in French customs . . . [t]he sagest verdict will be for housekeeping; taking an apartment, that is, and enjoying the pleasures of independence’.74 Rather than seeking the comforts of home, women visiting Paris ought to immerse themselves in ‘the colloquial and manners [of] the genuine French household . . . where no English is uttered, and where no English or American ways are even divined’.75 While the guidebook’s emphasis on domestic management – how to ‘keep house’ and shop for food in Paris – may seem to mark it as conventionally feminine, I suggest that Abbot’s purpose was not to confine women to domestic duties but to empower them to live independently and authentically in Paris.76 Like Ivimy, who urged women out into the city, Abbot suggested that female travellers to Paris should seek not a retreat from but a greater participation in French life. These writers’ resistance of mainstream guidebook culture extended into the content they included in their guidebooks. As with their advice about where women could visit, they tailored their information about Paris specifically for women, viewing this content as crucial for redressing the failings of mainstream, male-authored guidebooks. In addition to the photographs of Parisian landmarks like the Luxembourg Palace and the Trocadéro, Abbot included images of women at work in the city, such as the drawing of a nurse-maid and the photograph of a flower-woman, pictured below (Figure 2).77 Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Mary Abbot, ‘Nurse-maid’ and ‘Flower-woman,’ in A Woman’s Paris (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1900), n.p. (from <Hathitrust.org> [accessed 3 December 2019], Public Domain, Google-digitized from copy held at University of Michigan library). Figure 2. Open in new tabDownload slide Mary Abbot, ‘Nurse-maid’ and ‘Flower-woman,’ in A Woman’s Paris (Boston: Small, Maynard and Company, 1900), n.p. (from <Hathitrust.org> [accessed 3 December 2019], Public Domain, Google-digitized from copy held at University of Michigan library). Quotidian life, and in particular the quotidian life of Parisian women, was important in the Paris that Abbot sought to present. Although she recognized that women would be interested in visiting spaces of cultural importance like ‘[t]he Avenue des Champs-Élysées, . . . the most perfect thoroughfare in the world’, Abbot also recommended that her female readers learn about the city through visiting the untouristed places where women worked, like the ‘Paris laundries’, where ‘active and lively ladies’ worked ‘without any machines for saving of “elbow grease”’.78 Although as modern readers, we may feel discomfort at a form of tourism that views what Abbot termed the ‘unprogressive’ and ‘primitive’ laundry system of Paris as something to be consumed for foreign, privileged women’s entertainment, I suggest that Abbot intended her emphasis on the lives of working Parisian women as means of resisting the hierarchy of sights that male guidebook writers had chosen.79 Through learning about the working rhythms of the city, women were to experience a truer sense both of ‘the real “sights” of Paris’ and of how women occupied the city.80 Similarly, Ivimy used A Woman’s Guide to Paris to offer women a perspective on the city that masculine, mainstream guidebooks did not show. Although Ivimy included a section on Parisian fashion, she did not view the discussion of shopping as her guidebook’s contribution to women’s enjoyment of Paris; rather, she suggested that what female travellers were most interested in were the ‘contemporary movements affecting girls and women,’ and as a result, she included a ‘sociological section’ that featured discussions of ‘suffrage, professions for women, the Childrens’ Court of Law at the Palais de Justice, hospital nursing, settlements (Maisons Sociales), schools, public charity and the like’.81 In keeping with this emphasis on women’s experiences in Paris, Ivimy also featured ‘lady doctors’ and ‘lady dentists’ in her list of professionals that practised in the city.82 Seeing Paris as a woman, Ivimy’s guide implied, meant more than visits to Parisian dress-makers; it involved an interest in how French women inhabited their city and in the social and political structures that governed women’s lives. In Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris, Williams also outlined ways for female travellers to become involved in the life of the city. For her, becoming immersed in Paris came predominately through the city’s educational opportunities. Praising France’s ‘superb generosity’ in offering foreign students access to ‘a liberal education’ at an ‘extremely moderate and often merely nominal’ price, Williams mentioned various libraries, lectures, and programs of study available to her readers.83 She also included information on taking classes in art, music, and French.84 In drawing female readers’ attention to the various educational and cultural opportunities available to them, Williams provided a broader understanding of what female travellers could experience in Paris. Abbot and Ivimy did not see the lack of attention to women’s practical needs or personal interests as the only failures of mainstream guidebooks; rather, both Abbot’s A Woman’s Paris and Ivimy’s A Woman’s Guide to Paris expressed disdain for the overall conventions of guidebook travel and the ways in which texts like those by Murray and Baedeker offered a hurried, uniform, and ultimately guilt-inducing approach to Paris. Although Abbot noted in her Preface to A Woman’s Paris that she was writing for women who were ‘unprovided’ for by traditional guidebooks, she did not consider these different styles of travel to be neutral matters of personal preference.85 Rather, throughout her guidebook, she presented tourism in almost moral terms, characterizing mainstream travellers as ‘mad sight-seers who have to be steered through the show-places like lightning’ – a consequence that she felt resulted from overly detailed travel books as well as from a self-imposed obligation to see what others have deemed important.86 For Abbot, A Woman’s Paris did not merely fill a critical gap in guidebook offerings by addressing women’s travel needs; she envisioned her guidebook as also liberating women from traditional travel, with its ‘wild haste’ and ‘sacrifice of personal pleasure’.87 Although she included a reference to Baedeker as a resource for the ‘lists of restaurants’ that readers had come to expect from travel publications, it is clear throughout A Woman’s Paris that Abbot did not conceive of her guide as a complement to the practical lists and itineraries offered by Baedeker, but an initiation into an experience of Paris beyond what Baedeker could provide.88 Indeed, in many ways Abbot intended A Woman’s Paris to function almost as an anti-guidebook, or at the very least as a book that guided female travellers in the process of unlearning guidebook culture. In contrast to the ‘mad sight-seers’ who required ‘steer[ing]’ in order to see Paris, Abbot’s readers were to be women who learned to see the true Paris that could be found by going beyond ‘conventional programmes’; they were to ‘take their delight in just living in Paris, and letting sights and pleasures come’.89 Indeed, the key phrases Abbot included in her table of contents under ‘Sight-Seeing’ made plain her opinions of the Baedeker style of touring, which she saw as limiting rather than instructive: IX. SIGHT-SEEING . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Little scope allowed to the general traveller — Conventional programmes disparaged — Necessity of freedom of taste — Streets and other public resorts best at first — All kinds of crafts represented — Persons of leisure worth observing — Sights to be avoided. Throughout A Woman’s Paris, Abbot devalued the experience that traditional tourism offered, referring to how it created a ‘perfunctory[y]’ approach to the city that ‘[bred] . . . weariness of spirit’ by ‘cram[ming] the mind and fatigu[ing] it at the same time’.90 Scope, spontaneity, and individual freedom acted as guiding principles for Abbot’s vision of Parisian travel, and her guidebook clearly demonstrates that she formed these priorities as conscious departures from the rigid itineraries and cultural assumptions found in the ‘conventional’ guidebooks she so ‘disparaged’.91 Seeing Paris meant slowing down, and Abbot reminded her readers that ‘[n]one of [the] kind of tourism [she proposed] [could] be done in haste’.92 Instead, she asked readers to let ‘time and thought, and often mere accident [guide them] to a regular storehouse of beautiful objects’; the real way to see the city was to ‘let the stranger stroll, taking in what comes’.93 In contradiction to the methodical and hurried excursions that mainstream guidebooks proposed, Abbot ‘cordially recommended’ that her readers ‘walk as much as possible’ and ‘walk occasionally without any object except that of observing’.94 Such ambling and purposeless strolls through the city refuted guidebook culture’s implied belief that time in Paris could be wasted through what Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (1888) termed ‘unnecessary detours’.95 Moreover, this emphasis on leisurely, purposeless walking connected Abbot’s readers with the aims of the flaneur, whose goal in walking was not to reach a location but to observe everything and thereby take in the city’s character.96 In Abbot’s Paris, as in the perspective of the flaneur, ‘detours’ did not exist, because the entirety of Paris was imbued with cultural significance, and truly seeing Paris meant accumulating unhurried, quotidian experiences en route to major tourist sights.97 Indeed, Abbot’s focus on a leisurely pace through the space between the city’s ‘lions’ challenged the notion that time could be wasted in Paris if one did not move systematically and efficiently through to the areas of cultural capital.98 For Abbot, coming to truly know Paris also meant looking beyond the churches and the ‘galleries and museums’.99 The real Paris, she advocated, was to be found not in the Louvre but ‘by observing its daily life in streets and houses’, because ‘many interesting sights may be seen, although they may not be catalogued in a museum’, and ‘[u]neventful little shop-windows, down dull, crooked little streets, with funny people engaged in every-day pursuits sitting behind them, are often more valuable as object-lessons than the study of a scarab in the antiquity portion of the Louvre’.100 Her belief in the importance of the world beyond the museum stemmed partly from her sense that no one was really interested in the vision of Paris that tourist guides offered in the first place; she saw the cultural authority of Baedeker and similar guidebooks as having created a troubling legacy of travel in which ‘[p]ersons of all ages and callings, with no yearnings for art and no sympathy with collections, are dragged through galleries and museums, and, worse still, drag themselves from a wearisome sense of unpleasing duty to be done at any sacrifice of personal pleasure’.101 Because of Baedeker, ‘thousands of “sight-seers” immolate themselves weekly on the altar of supposed education, and are simply bored’.102 Abbot most desired to refute this sense that seeing Paris necessitated seeing the Louvre and churches, and although she discussed such landmarks, she offered readers not a prescriptive itinerary or method of approach but the freedom to choose as much or as little as they wished. Styled as a ‘hint-manual’ rather than as a true guidebook, A Woman’s Paris introduced female travellers to the possibility of individual preference and asked them to put aside their Baedeker and instead make their own choices.103 To a certain extent, Abbot exaggerated the inflexibility of traditional itineraries in her caricature of the prescribed ‘church-and-museum experience’ that Baedeker and other guidebooks offered: ‘there is nothing so stupid as going to see a church on Tuesday’, she wrote, ‘when one would rather see it on Friday or, perhaps, not at all’.104 Although this seems to be a deliberate misreading for effect, Abbot uses this theoretical inflexibility to illustrate the inconvenience of overly planned travel, which she believed shamed travellers for not visiting culturally significant sights. Heavily invested in removing female travellers’ sense of obligation and shame, Abbot reminded her readers that ‘[t]here is no reason why the whole world should be driven to pictures, and told to love them’.105 As opposed to the preparatory information that Baedeker and Grant Allen’s Paris (1900) offered to ensure that readers learned how to properly appreciate the Louvre’s art, Abbot implied that there was no need to visit the city’s museums if readers were not already interested. While Allen instructed his readers to visit the Louvre ‘in the chronological order here enumerated’ and ‘not skip from room to room, hap-hazard, but see what he sees systematically’,106 Abbot suggested that if travellers had ‘no great particular craving for any one form of art, a desultory, drifting manner of going about is the most delightful’.107 Personal craving, rather than chronology, was to drive Abbot’s female travellers, and she believed that an unfocused approach could in fact yield increased enjoyment. Churches and art museums also figured heavily in Ivimy’s reversal of guidebook conventions in A Woman’s Guide to Paris; by proposing that readers see what was most interesting to them and by assuming that the most interesting sights were not those in the museums or churches anyway, Ivimy too eschewed the rigidity and sense of obligation that Baedeker and Allen cultivated. Indeed, she readily admitted that ‘no visitor to Paris’ really desired ‘to make an exhaustive examination’ of the Louvre, an experience which she saw as ‘a singularly unprofitable way of spending a half day’.108 Rather than requiring her readers to see and enjoy each of the churches that previous guidebooks had deemed important, she chose to describe ‘only the most interesting and the most beautiful’ churches of Paris because she ‘[had] yet to meet the woman who was prepared to make an exhaustive inspection of the seventy odd churches of the capital’.109 Such a statement about women’s lack of interest in the city’s churches may appear somewhat disparaging, as it potentially characterizes women as too frivolous to value the cultural landmarks of Paris. However, Ivimy, like Abbot, seems to imply that, in fact, no one – male or female – was particularly interested in the obligatory tours Baedeker and others forced upon them, and that women were merely honest enough to admit to it. Tradition and expectation, Ivimy believed, forced countless tourists to retrace someone else’s itinerary of what was worthwhile to see in Paris because, as Abbot suggested, ‘skipping anything’ on Baedeker’s itinerary would have caused travellers to feel ‘ashamed to meet [their] friends’ to recount their experiences.110 In place of cultural pressure and shame, Abbot’s A Woman’s Paris advocated that amusement should instead dictate one’s sightseeing destinations: It is far more fun at any rate, . . . to take a walk to the Jardin d’Acclimatation, and see the newly married bourgeois riding on ostriches and having their photographs done together in slot-machines. . . . The rest of the party may be repeating the words ‘Gothic’ and ‘Romanesque’ like parrots, and viewing their examples like automatons. One at least is having a good time.111 Letting personal preference and even ‘fun’ shape one’s movements to Paris, Abbot implied, would likely lead travellers away from the museums and into Parisian parks, where people-watching took precedence over art appreciation, and where amusement mattered more than cultural capital. In Abbot’s view, cultural duty had no place in one’s experience of Paris. Duty – as exemplified by endless art tours and methodical visits to churches – turned tourists into ‘parrots’ and ‘automatons’; amusement turned them back into individuals and freed them from mindlessly repeating the itineraries and values of others. Although Abbot recognized that tradition and expectation were difficult to resist – referring to the anti-tourist as someone who was ‘lost to shame and dead to ambition, one who disobeys the traditional teachings of touring’ – she dedicated much of the content in the book to helping her readers ‘unlearn’ sightseeing and to value serendipity.112 It was the world outside the museum and the church, Abbot contended, that offered the most typically Parisian experience, and if women had any duty at all on their journey to Paris, it was to see that which truly mattered to them. 5. GUIDEBOOK AS REBELLION: A CONCLUSION In resisting the traditional checklist of worthwhile sights in Paris, these guidebooks for women proposed a new way of touring, one that was based on individual interest, enjoyment, and serendipity. They recognized the value of ‘stroll[ing]’ and of ‘taking in what comes’, privileging ‘the streets and boulevards, . . . the theatres, the parks, the churches at service-times, the funerals, the weddings’ as ‘[t]he real “sights” of Paris’.113 In making such suggestions, these guides for women challenged mainstream guidebooks’ implied conception of Paris as a space with isolated pockets of cultural importance, requiring carefully crafted routes in order to avoid uninteresting sights. While general guidebooks retraced other travellers’ itineraries, leaving out the opportunity for personal exploration and connection, these guidebooks for women privileged individual interests over cultural capital and presented the whole of Paris as a space of personal discovery rather than a checklist of culturally significant sights. Although aimed at Anglo-American female audiences, women’s guidebooks critiqued the merit of mainstream guidebooks’ advice for any traveller, and they attempted to free readers from travel as cultural duty by modelling travel based on personal preference. They upended mainstream guidebooks’ grammar for travel and cultural interaction; they resisted an institutionalized sense of Paris, conceiving of travel to France’s capital as an exploratory and individual journey. Rather than suggesting that women in particular required a less rigorous and intellectual experience of Paris, Abbot and Ivimy (and Williams, to a lesser extent) implied that mainstream guidebooks’ approach to travel satisfied no one and created a culture of uninterested travellers too embarrassed to diverge from their guidebooks’ itineraries. However, while these writers critiqued the conventions of mainstream travel as elitist and ultimately unsatisfying for everyone, I suggest that it was not by accident that they sought to empower women in particular to seek greater freedom and individual preference in travel. Their alternative exploration of Paris allowed women urban autonomy – an ability to choose what was of value to them and an escape from a male-authored view of Paris. In privileging the under-explored and the undiscovered spaces of the city, guidebooks for women gave voice to the individual and unheard perspectives of female travellers; they reversed the hierarchy of travel and suggested that women’s personal preferences and the minor landmarks of Paris were equal, if not superior, to Baedeker’s pronouncements and the guidebook-sanctioned spaces of the city. Indeed, these writers saw it as their mission to provide women a space both in the physical city of Paris and in the cultural dialogue about Paris. Women’s guidebooks also intervened in the nation’s understanding of women’s spatial boundaries as well as in the culture of the nineteenth-century guidebook. In stressing the viability of the ‘Solitary Woman’ inhabiting public space and in encouraging female readers to take up the urban opportunities that Paris made available to them, guidebooks for women participated in a larger cultural effort to write women into the city and out of a passive, domestic role.114A Woman’s Paris, for example, seemed to position female readers not as domestic creatures but as flâneuses in the public spaces of Paris: ‘new-comers’ should ‘walk as much as possible about the interesting streets, and walk occasionally without any object except that of observing’.115 Ultimately, these guides presented a transgressive way of understanding both Parisian space and the role of women in the city; they functioned as anti-guidebooks and spaces of cultural resistance that invited women to take up residence in a Paris of their own making and to see a female perspective on the city as more valid than the one that mainstream guidebooks offered to them. FUNDING This work draws on my PhD dissertation, funded and supported by the Faculty of Graduate Studies, University of British Columbia; Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS In particular, I wish to thank Kylee-Anne Hingston, Deanna Kreisel, Elizabeth Ludlow, Lisa Surridge, and the anonymous reviewers for their advice on earlier versions of this article and the Victorian Studies Association of Western Canada for awarding a conference paper version of this research the 2015 Founders’ Circle Award. DISCLOSURE STATEMENT No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. Footnotes 1 Julian Green, Paris, trans. by J. A. Underwood (New York, NY: M. Boyars, 1991), p. 49. 2 E. M. Forster, A Room with a View, ed. by Oliver Stallybrass (London and New York, NY: Penguin, 1978), pp. 39, 36–7. 3 Forster, A Room with a View, pp. 40–41. 4 Forster, A Room with a View, pp. 81. 5 Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit, ed. by Stephen Wall and Helen Small (London: Penguin, 1998), p. 492. John Chetwode Eustace (1762–1815) was the author of the popular travel book A Classical Tour Through Italy (1815). Although Dickens disparaged guidebook-mediated travel in his fiction, he also used guidebooks, particularly Murray’s, while on his own travels. See Jan Palmowski, ‘Travels with Baedeker: The Guidebook and the Middle Classes in Victorian and Edwardian Britain’, in Histories of Leisure, ed. by Rudy Koshar (Oxford and New York, NY: Berg, 2002), pp. 105–30 (p. 105), 6 John Murray first published his Murray’s Handbooks in 1836, and by 1855, his guidebooks were described as ‘cover[ing] nearly the whole of the Continent and constitut[ing] one of the great powers of Europe’ (Hillard, qtd. in John R. Gretton, ‘Introduction’, A Guide to the Microfiche Editions of Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers, by W. B. C. Lister (University Publications of America, 1993), pp. ix, vii–xlviii. Karl Baedeker, a German publisher, first introduced English versions of his guidebooks in the 1860s. 7 Roger Clark, ‘Threading the Maze: Nineteenth-Century Guides for British Travellers to Paris’ in Parisian Fields, ed. by Michael Sheringham (London: Reaktion, 1996), pp. 8–29 (p. 26); Marjorie Morgan, National Identities and Travel in Victorian Britain (Basingstoke and New York, NY: Palgrave, 2001), p. 13. 8 James Buzard, The Beaten Track: European Tourism, Literature, and the Ways to Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 47–8. 9 Qtd. in Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 91. There is, of course, an implicit classism in these denunciations of popular tourism, as upper-class travellers would have had the education, time and money to see the Continent without the help of the mainstream guidebook. For further discussions of the extensive influence that guidebooks held over British tourists see also Richard Mullen and James Munson,‘The Smell of the Continent’: The British Discover Europe (London: Pan Macmillan, 2009); Morgan, National Identities and Travel; Ann C. Colley, Victorians in the Mountains: Sinking the Sublime (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010). 10 As Paul Fussell has argued, ‘[t]ourism requires that you see conventional things, and that you see them in a conventional way’ (The Norton Book of Travel, (New York, NY: Norton, 1987), p. 651). Although ‘tourist’ was previously used interchangeably with the term ‘traveller’, a distinction emerged at mid century, when ‘tourist’ came to denote someone who lacked the originality and attention to detail that a true traveller valued. See also Buzard, The Beaten Track, pp. 1–3. 11 These three guidebook writers were American, although they wrote for women on both sides of the Atlantic and saw British and American women as equally hindered by mainstream travel culture. The Boston-published A Woman’s Paris (1900) does not include the name of its author, but the New York Public Library’s digitized copy lists its author as Mary Abbot. I have been unable to track down any more information about her, but archive.org, which provides a digitized copy of her guidebook, also has a copy of Home Spun Yarns by a Mary Abbot Rand, presumably her name after marriage. Likewise, I have not been able to find out more information about Elizabeth Otis Williams. Her guidebook was published in Chicago in 1907. One reference to a London-published edition appears in the bibliography of Frank Trentmann’s Empire of Things (New York, NY: Harper Collins, 2016), at p. 718, but I have been unable to track down this edition myself. Alice M. Ivimy, an Anglo-American journalist, published A Woman’s Guide to Paris (1909) first in London and the following year in New York. Ivimy appears to have been a skilled translator of French publications, including Frédéric Loliée’s Women of the Second Empire; Chronicles of the Court of Napoleon III (London and New York, NY: John Lane, 1907) and Honoré de Balzac’s Love in a Mask; or, Imprudence and Happiness: A Hitherto Unpublished Novel (Chicago, IL, and New York, NY: Rand McNally and Company, 1911). 12 Marjorie Morgan argues that in addition to being ‘invitations to new and exciting sites’, guidebooks, in their ‘effort to point out hotels, eating places, and churches catering to the English’ were also ‘protectors from the foreign’ (National Identities and Travel, p. 21). Indeed, Daniel Appleton’s European Guide Book (London and New York, NY: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer; Appleton, 1871) provided readers with a list of Parisian hotels ‘frequented’ by English and American travellers (p. 213). Other travel writers urged bringing one’s own sheets because of different standards of cleanliness and comfort; see Peter Thorold, The British in France: Visitors and Residents since the Revolution (London and New York, NY: Continuum, 2008), p. 33. 13 See Deborah Epstein Nord, Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representations, and the City (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995) and Judith R. Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight: Narratives of Sexual Danger in Late-Victorian London (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1992). 14 Martha Vicinus writes that, although women gained ‘greater freedom’ of movement in the 1880s and 1890s, ‘[a] lady was simply not supposed to be seen aimlessly wandering the streets in the evening or eating alone’. (Independent Women: Work and Community for Single Women, 1850–1920 (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 297). Similarly, Walkowitz notes that fin-de-siècle London’s West End was seen ‘as a notorious site for street harassment of respectable women’ (‘Going Public: Shopping, Street Harassment, and Streetwalking in Late Victorian London’, Representations, 62 (1998), 1–30 (p. 1)). 15 Deborah L. Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis: Women, the City, and Modernity (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), pp. 43, 5. 16 Alice M. Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris (New York, NY: Brentano’s, 1910), p. v. 17 Charles Baudelaire, The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, ed. and trans. by Jonathan Mayne (New York, NY: Phaidon Press, 1995), p. 9. 18 Scholars have debated whether, given the constraints placed on them in urban spaces, women could experience the city as flâneuses. Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson has stated that ‘[t]here are, and can be, no flâneuses’ because while ‘[t]he flâneur’s movement within the city . . . points to a privileged status’, a woman’s ‘[m]obility renders her suspect’ (Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1994), pp. 85, 84). Other scholars, however, see in the fin-de-siècle period a growing ability for women to experience urban spaces as ‘walkers and observers’ (Parsons, Streetwalking the Metropolis, p. 6). See also Aruna D’Souza and Tom McDonough, eds, The Invisible Flâneuse?: Gender, Public Space, and Visual Culture in Nineteenth-Century Paris (Manchester and New York, NY: Manchester University Press, 2008). 19 Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 65. 20 Planta’s guide was first published in 1814 and went through 15 subsequent editions, with the last one appearing in 1831. See Clark, ‘Threading the Maze’, pp. 15, 17, 19. 21 Clark, ‘Threading the Maze’, p. 20. 22 Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 48. 23 Buzard, The Beaten Track, pp. 65, 48. See also Elisabeth Jay, British Writers and Paris, 1830–1875 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 58. 24 For more on the publishing history and reception of guidebooks by Murray and Baedeker, see Gràinne Goodwin and Gordon Johnston, ‘Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century: John Murray’s Handbooks for Travellers’, Studies in Travel Writing, 17 (2013), 43–61. 25 Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 66. 26 Clark, ‘Threading the Maze’, p. 23. 27 Buzard, The Beaten Track, p. 287. 28 Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1888), p. 51. 29 George Bradshaw, Bradshaw’s Illustrated Travellers’ Hand Book to France (London: W. J. Adams, 1855), pp. xi–xii. 30 The Preface to Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1859 (Paris: A. and W. Galignani, 1859) proposes a similar logic in which the ‘volume is calculated to save the visitor much useless expenditure of time and exertion’ so that the traveller ‘will see every thing in a comparatively short space of time, and will pass over nothing that is really worthy of being examined’ (pp. i–ii). Galignani’s use of words such as ‘calculated’, ‘studying’, ‘inspecting’, and ‘examined’ reflects the degree to which travel was presented as a pre-planned and almost emotionless endeavour: the ‘contents’ of Paris were to be given appropriate consideration and investigation. Thorough examination, rather than enjoyment or pleasure, was the implicit goal of travel. Additionally, with words like ‘calculated’, ‘useless’, ‘expenditure’, and ‘worthy’, Galignani evoked an almost financial way of viewing walking: his highly structured approach to the city ensured that the traveller did not waste time and posited an economy in which efficient journeys translated into worthwhile travel. 31 Murray’s Handbook for Visitors to Paris (London: John Murray, 1867), p. a2. 32 See the ‘Plan for seeing the Principal Objects’ in Murray’s Handbook for Visitors to Paris, p. 36. 33 Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs, p. xxix. In a guidebook designed to only cover ‘object of general interest’ because ‘a detailed account of all the specialties of Paris . . . far exceeds the limits of a work of this character’, the fact that Baedeker devotes 20 of its just under 500 pages to an introduction to French art – in addition to its 60-page section on the Louvre’s art – makes clear the guidebook writer’s sense that an exhaustive understanding of French art is seen as general interest (p. v). 34 Grant Allen, Paris (New York, NY: Stokes, 1900), p. 71, emphasis in original. 35 Allen, Paris, p. 10. 36 Quoted in Goodwin and Johnston, ‘Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 51. In this case, the writer was referring to the instruction provided in Murray’s Handbook to the Continent. 37 Palmowski, ‘Travels with Baedeker’, p. 116. 38 Allen, Paris, p. 15; Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs, p. 51. 39 Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1878), p. 20. 40 Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (Leipzig: Karl Baedeker, 1900), p. 73. 41 Galignani’s New Paris Guide for 1859, p. 12. 42 Allen, Paris, p. 10. 43 In writing about particular sights in Europe, travellers often reproduced in their journals the exact words and sentiments from the popular guidebooks. See Palmowski, ‘Travels with Baedeker’, p. 110. 44 As Palmowski points out, while the guidebook was written for middle-class travellers and thus ‘reflected middle-class views’, it also came to ‘determine’ what these middle-class views on travel were (‘Travels with Baedeker’, p. 111). 45 Lynne Withey, Grand Tours and Cook’s Tours: A History of Leisure Travel, 1750 to 1915 (New York, NY: William Morrow, 1997), pp. 145, 158. 46 See Lady Sydney Morgan, France (London: Henry Colburn, 1817); Frances Trollope, Paris and the Parisians in 1835 (London: Richard Bentley, 1836); Martha Macdonald Lamont, Impressions, Thoughts, and Sketches (London: Edward Moxon, 1844); Dinah Mulock Craik, Fair France: Impressions of a Traveller (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1871); Emma Georgina Elizabeth Ward, Outside Paris during the Two Sieges. By an Englishwoman (London: S. M. & A. Warren and J. Davy & Sons, 1871); Matilda Betham Edwards, A Year in Western France (London: Longmans, Green, 1877); Matilda Betham Edwards, Holidays in Eastern France (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1879). 47 Jay, British Writers and Paris, p. 180. 48 Maria H. Frawley has articulated that we can see women’s ‘[p]ublished travel accounts . . . as implicit statements of the right to contribute to a discourse deemed by their society to be culturally valuable’ (A Wider Range: Travel Writing by Women in Victorian England (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1994), p. 29). While not undermining the level of participation that travel writing offered women, I see the publication of female-authored guidebooks as offering women an additional sense of agency and authority within the discourse of travel. 49 See Erika D. Rappaport, ‘Traveling in the Lady Guide’s London: Consumption, Modernity and the Fin-de-Siècle Metropolis’, in Meanings of Modernity: Britain from Late-Victorian Times to World War Two, ed. by Martin Daunton and Bernhard Reiger (New York, NY, and London: Berg Publishers and New York University Press, 2001), pp. 25–43. 50 ‘Lady Guides’, Littel’s Living Age, 26 January 1889, 254–5 (p. 254). 51 ‘Notices’, Standard, 3 June 1889, 12. 52 ‘London’s Lady Guides’, Tuapeka Times, 29 March 1890, 4. 53 ‘Miss-guided Folks in Paris’, Punch, 6 July 1889, 9. 54 ‘Lady Guides’, Saturday Review, 13 Ocober 1888, 425. 55 ‘The Lady Guide and the Tory Tourist’, Fun, 17 April 1889, 167, 172. 56 ‘Another Lady Guide’, Judy, 27 February 1895, 105. 57 Erika D. Rappaport, Shopping for Pleasure: Women in the Making of London’s West End (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), p. 111. 58 Although Williams’ guidebook was published in Chicago, she assumes her readership comprises women from both Britain and the United States. Also, as mentioned earlier, there was possibly an edition published in London. 59 Buzard, The Beaten Path, p. 149. Indeed, Lilias Campbell Davidson’s Hints to Lady Travellers at Home and Abroad (London: Iliffe and Son, 1889), a text offering general travel advice for women, fits this expected model: while writing for the woman who wants to be ‘her own unescorted and independent person, a lady traveller’, Davidson also stressed the potential dangers of travel as a woman and advised women on how to maintain respectability in one’s dress while ‘mountaineering and deer-stalking’ (pp. 255, 152). Although cautioning against the fear that ‘peril lurk in ambush in your path’, Davidson did include a section on ‘Accidents’ and recommended that ‘in the moment of danger’ women ‘keep still and be ready for action’ because ‘[i]t is so much an instinct with the stronger sex to protect and look after the weaker, that in all cases of the sort, if there is a man at the head of affairs, he had better be left to manage matters without the hampering interference of feminine physical weakness’ (pp. 14, 12). See Sara Mills, Discourses of Difference: An Analysis of Women’s Travel Writing and Colonialism (London and New York, NY: Routledge, 1991), pp. 99–102. 60 Editions of mainstream guidebooks did not list authors; however, the majority of titles published by Murray seem to have been written by men. For example, John Murray III wrote the first editions of ‘Handbooks for Southern Germany, Switzerland and France’, and Henry Parish wrote the firm’s Handbook for Travellers to the East (Goodwin and Johnston, ‘Guidebook Publishing in the Nineteenth Century’, p. 44). This model of anonymous male writers was likely representative of the guidebook genre as a whole. 61 Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying, p. 40. Mainstream guidebooks also listed where one could buy various articles of clothing, including women’s fashions such as fans, gloves, hats, and lace, although they allotted fewer pages to this section. See as an example the ‘Shops’ section of the 1874 edition of Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (pp. 30–38). 62 Of the three guidebooks writers, Williams was the least direct in her criticisms of the conventional guidebook and its suppositions about travel, although her comments and the scope of her guidebook gesture to an implicit critique. Accordingly, I will focus more on Abbot and Ivimy in the section that follows. 63 By contrast, Evelyn Upton, writing for The Girl’s Own Paper over a decade earlier, in 1889, made clear that she ‘[did] not for a moment propose that one lady—least of all a young lady—should spend a week in Paris by herself’ because it would ‘be the height of impropriety’ and because Paris requires ‘more discreetness of behaviour . . . than . . . any other city in the world’ (‘A Week in Paris for Six Pounds’, The Girl’s Own Paper, 26 October 1889, 51–54 (p. 51)). 64 Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying, p. iv. 65 Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying, pp. 50, 25. 66 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, pp. 33, 3, 90. 67 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, pp. 73, 30. 68 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. v. 69 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. v. 70 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. v. 71 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. v. 72 Mary Abbot, A Woman’s Paris: A Handbook of Every-day Living in the French Capital (Boston, MA: Small, Maynard and Company, 1900), p. 181. Of course, Abbot also reminded readers of the places off-limits to women, such as Maxim’s and ‘[t]he Café de Paris, at supper-time’, which was ‘a little gay for a quiet lady’ (p. 183). 73 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 182, 15. 74 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 11. 75 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 11–12. 76 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. iv. 77 See also ‘Woman and Dog in Harness’ (inserted in between pages 86 and 87). 78 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 127, 86, 87. 79 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 87. 80 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 83. 81 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. vii. 82 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, pp. 8–10. 83 Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris, pp. 71, 72. 84 Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying in Paris, pp. 89–100. 85 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. v. 86 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. v. 87 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. v, 81. 88 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 50. 89 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. v, xi, v. 90 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 81–82. 91 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. xi. 92 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 150. 93 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 150, 140. 94 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 140. 95 Baedeker’s Paris and its Environs (1888), p. 51. 96 Abbot’s emphasis on ‘stroll[ing], taking in what comes’ also seems to anticipate some of what Guy Debord proposes in his ‘Theory of the Dérive’, in which he suggests that people should ‘drift’ in the city and ‘let themselves be drawn by the attractions of the terrain and the encounters they find there’ (Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 140; Guy Debord, ‘Theory of the Dérive’, Les Lèvres Nues, 9 (November 1956) trans. by Ken Knabb, <https://www.cddc.vt.edu/sionline/si/theory.html> [accessed 4 November 2018]). 97 Walking in A Woman’s Paris seems to anticipate Michel De Certeau, who proposed that, through walking, pedestrians accumulate urban knowledge and transform a city from an abstract ‘place’ into a lived ‘space’ with associative connections (Michel De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. by Steven Rendall (Berkeley, Los Angeles, CA, London: University of California Press, 1984), p. 117). 98 Although Williams’ critique of conventional travel was more implied, she too privileged slower speed of travel. She frequently noted enjoyable walks and cafés to spend time in, and even the title of her guidebook, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying, seems to imply a lingering, meandering speed (pp. 60–62). 99 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 81. 100 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 81, 82–83. 101 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 81. 102 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 81. 103 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 94. 104 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 82. 105 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 94. 106 Allen, Paris, p. 71, bold in original. 107 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 98. 108 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. 199. Her time frame of a half-day would have shocked Grant Allen, who felt that six days at the Louvre was the very minimum. 109 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. vi. 110 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 82. 111 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 83. Williams also drew her readers’ attention to French wedding parties, noting that Robinson, a day trip from Paris, provided people-watching opportunities in the form of ‘riding-part[ies] led by the bride and groom on donkeys’ (Williams, Sojourning, Shopping, and Studying, p. 62). 112 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 82. 113 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, pp. 140, 83–84. 114 Ivimy, A Woman’s Guide to Paris, p. v. 115 Abbot, A Woman’s Paris, p. 140. © 2020 Leeds Trinity University This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)