ABSTRACT
This chapter complicates the currents of scholarship which criticise women's travel writing for being overly impressionistic, presenting these travelogues not as failures of originality or accuracy, but as a pointed response to earlier authoritarian guidebooks. Within the first three decades of the nineteenth century, the number of tourists crossing the Channel increased exponentially per annum, fuelled by technological advancements, a changing British economy, and package-tour companies like Thomas Cook's. For tourists travelling in Europe, and later, further abroad Murray, Baedeker, and Ruskin were the established vade mecums dictating where tourists went, what they saw, and even how they felt about a given sight. The popularity of travel writing by the mid-nineteenth century had created what Eric Savoy calls a 'self-conscious exhaustion of the genre'. Scholarship about travel writing tends to focus on this moment of impossibility, in which all texts are made redundant by endless repetition of well-documented journeys.
